‘It’s the kind of SF that, as Doctorow has it, “predicts the present” rather than imagines the future. “I like to take something that already exists but isn’t very mainstream and write about it as though it’s being invented next year,” he explains. “Then as the thing you’ve written about becomes more mainstream everyone assumes that you invented it, rather than having been inspired by the nascent invention you’ve just heard of.”

This approach does inevitably rely on readers coming to the book with a certain level of natural geekiness, and Doctorow appears to make few concessions to an audience that doesn’t, for example, regularly browse Wired magazine or keep up with the latest online developments. Nor does he apologise for this. “I really think that books today are meant to be read with Google next to you – that anything that you come to where you think, hmmm, that really does sound interesting: I’d like to know if it’s real, I’d like to know how it works, how it fits into the story – you go to Google,” he says. “It’s like a little Easter egg in the book, to go to Google and see that this stuff is real to some extent or another.”’

— Michelle Pauli, The Guardian, 07/12/2009