American literature during this period was saturated with cybernetic metaphors, concepts, and themes. In fact, many of the novels that would later come to form the canonical instances of postmodern literature are essentially built around cybernetic concepts such as information, entropy, feedback, and system—from the allegories of control in William Burroughs’s Nova trilogy and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, to the melodramas of heat death and entropic decay in Philip K. Dick’s Ubik and A Scanner Darkly and J. G. Ballard’s short stories (to name a British writer); from the paradoxes of information and entropy in William Gaddis’s Jr and Thomas Pynchon’s 1960s novels, to the thought of feedback and system in John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, and, later on, Don DeLillo.2 If you were a white man and interested in experimentation in prose fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, then you were probably writing about machines, entropy, and information. [...]