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Digital and electronic technologies that act as extensions of our bodies and minds are changing how we live, think, act, and write. Some welcome these developments as bringing humans closer to unified consciousness and eternal life. Others worry that invasive globalized technologies threaten to destroy the self and the world. Whether feared or desired, these innovations provoke emotions that have long fueled the religious imagination, suggesting the presence of a latent spirituality in an era mistakenly deemed secular and posthuman. William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo are American authors who explore this phenomenon thoroughly in their work. Engaging the works of each in conversation, Mark C. Taylor discusses their sophisticated representations of new media, communications, information, and virtual technologies and their transformative effects on the self and society. He focuses on Gaddis's The Recognitions, Powers's Plowing the Dark, Danielewski's House of Leaves, and DeLillo's Underworld, following the interplay of technology and religion in their narratives and their imagining of the transition from human to posthuman states. Their challenging ideas and inventive styles reveal the fascinating ways religious interests affect emerging technologies and how, in turn, these technologies guide spiritual aspirations. To read these novels from this perspective is to see them and the world anew.

As Adie and the others rush to meet their deadline, her doubts about the validity of their enterprise grow. \"VR reinvents the terms of existence,\" Spiegel states. \"It redefines what it means to be human. All those old dead-end ontological undergrad conundrums? They've now become questions of engineering.\" Adie's doubts about this brave new world are doubled by the world events breaking into her VR sanctuary: the massacre in Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the break-up of the Soviet Union, and the outbreak of the Persian Gulf War. Like the Alec Guinness character in \"The Bridge on the River Kwai,\" Adie suddenly realizes that the joy of creation has blinded her to the uses to which her creation will be put, and she takes appropriate action. (I won't spoil it for you.) All this and more is at the heart of Plowing the Dark, [Richard Powers]'s seventh and perhaps greatest novel. In each of his novels, Powers tackles a specialized field of study--economics in his last one, genetics and cognitive neurology in earlier ones--and uses it as a vehicle for his career-long meditation on the nature of artistic creation. They can be described as intellectual thrillers because, despite their brainy subjects, there is a palpable sense of drama in each of them. In Plowing the Dark the subject is computer technology, specifically the development of Virtual Reality. The novel opens in 1989--the year the term \"Virtual Reality\" was coined, according to Webster's--as a painter named Adie Klarpool is lured away from a boring job in commercial art by an old college friend named Stevie Spiegel to join him at a digital laboratory near Seattle. Spiegel is part of a team creating a VR room, and they need Adie's artistic touch to enhance their programming. She reluctantly joins them but is soon caught up in the limitless potential of this digital form of artistic creation.