How does one write science fiction when the atom bomb (and later 9/11) makes the future seem impossible to predict? Justin Roby reviews Paul Youngquist's Cyberfiction: After the Future, which explores how postwar "cy-fi" critiqued life in the age of cybernetic control systems.

Caroline Levine argues that Jason Mittell's attempts to classify The Wire by genre results in "some slippery logic, some fruitful and provocative but not altogether persuasive argumentative moves in Mittell's own game." She suggests that examining the show through the lens of form - not genre - clarifies why it warrants comparisons with texts like Bleak House: both works attempt to represent the distinctly networked quality of urban social life.

Can Critical Code Studies overcome the divide between technology workers and technocultural theorists?

In the second installment of a six-week discussion, contributors search for examples of Critical Code Studies "in the wild." Instead of asking how code can be read critically, they examine how code is already being created and disputed by lawyers, programmers, and the general public.

Can the rising cost of cosmopolitan real estate have brought the New York City novel to a low point? Tom LeClair measures recent fictions from and about New York City - including three "9/11 novels" - against the Systems Novel of the mid-1970s.

"What would a history of postwar U.S. literature look like that did not take society as its major organizing principle?" Daniel Worden reviews Michael Clune's American Literature and the Free Market, 1945-2000, which traces the emergence of the "economic fiction," in which the market is neither a mystified form of social relations nor an expression of individual values, but a virtual economy that structures experience.

Two innovative contemporary writers discuss the relationship between encyclopedic narrative and notions of gender and writing, the body as the physical embodiment of memory, and the unique syntax of Tillman's American Genius, A Comedy. The novel's prose depicts the way "thought, when you're not thinking, happens."

David Lavery ponders the "neo-baroque" tap-dancing of TV's most playful and commercially successful serial drama.

Jason Mittell calls David Simon's bluff: to what degree is The Wire really like a "televised novel"? To what degree is it more like a video game? Why not classify it as what it really is - a genre-spawning "masterpiece" in the medium of television.

Anthony Warde traces Daniel Punday's analysis of the intertwining strands of contemporary "fictionality," the different modes - from "myth" to "assemblage" - by which invented stories are legitimated. Punday's work implies that the active construction of 'life-fictions' is becoming more significant in contemporary technoculture, a view that runs counter to the more pessimistic view of agency in Baudrillard's Simulacrum America and other accounts of a wholly 'virtual' reality.

In this review of Robert Chodat's Worldly Acts and Sentient Things, Stephen Dougherty argues that Chodat's inquiry could have profited from a deeper engagement with posthumanist thought.

Stuart Moulthrop uses the lessons of hypertext as both an analogy and an explanation for why hypertext and its criticism will stay in a "niche" - and why, despite Bell's concern, that's not such a bad thing. As the response of an author to his critic, addressed to "thee," "implicitly dragging her into the niche with me," this review also dramatizes the very productivity of such specialized, nodal encounters.

David Shields is hungry, but not hungry enough. So says Curtis White, who argues that by ignoring anti-realism's past and present, Shields writes as if "New York" and "now" are the only contexts that matter.

In his introduction to the Cognitive Fictions cluster, Joseph Tabbi suggests that reflexive, non-narrative literature plays a critical role in the new media ecology. Postmodernist writing by Joseph McElroy and Italo Calvino, the posthumanist thought of Cary Wolfe, and the emerging forms of electronic literature each occupy a position between narrative modes of consciousness and "object-oriented" computer and cognitive science.

Stephen Burn connects Don DeLillo's fifteenth novel, Point Omega, with the author's long-running investigation into the structures of the mind. Using an elusive narrative architecture, images from a slowed-down film, and moments of second- and third-order observation, the novel dramatizes the mind's pre-conscious fiction-making processes.

In this review-essay, James J. Pulizzi reads Joseph McElroy's 1977 novel, Plus, as a Bildungsroman for the posthuman: instead of tracing the development of a subject, the novel traces the development of processes that call the very idea of a subject into question. As a human brain adjusts to its new housing in an experimental satellite, the text unfolds in a series of re-entries and re-mappings, an unfolding that necessarily implicates the reader.

D. Fox Harrell considers how a media theory of the "phantasmal" - mental image and ideological construction - can be used to cover gaps within electronic literary practice and criticism. His perspective is shaped by cognitive semantics and the approach to meaning-making known as "conceptual blending theory."

Minds bind - make coherent meaning from distributed processes - and narratives do, too. The means by which they do so remains a mystery, however. Kiki Benzon suggests that this mystery is at the heart of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, a text whose layered structure, typographical blending, and central metaphor - a house much bigger than the sum of its parts - enact the problem of binding on multiple levels.

Excerpted from a forthcoming nonfiction book on water, Joseph McElroy's essay ponders (among other questions) the relationship between the physical waters of the world and brain and the phenomenal waters of the mind. "I meant to ask, 'What has water to say on the subject of us?" - i.e., on its own without prompting? Dumb question, it tells me."

In his new book, Michael Wutz examines how the work of four canonical novelists - Norris, Lowry, Doctorow, and Powers - register the revolutions in 20th century media technology. Such an analysis, reviewer Joseph Conte suggests, is an important extension of Kittlerian media theory to the field of American literature.