Customer Reviews

Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination

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I tried to find a simple and concise description of what the book is about, but I cannot better Rosalind Williams own description at the start of Chapter One. "What are the consequences when human beings dwell in an environment that is predominantly built rather than given? This book seeks to answer that question. It explores the psychological, social and political implications of living in a technological world".

Rosalind Williams has delivered an insightful and extremely readable book. This book could easily have been a dry academic text that did little more than bring together a huge set of disconnected references from the last 150+ years. Instead of this, the author has contructed an engaging narrative that does justice to the extensive research and insightful analysis which flows through the book.

A must for anyone interested in technology and its impact of society and the individual.

I was really excited after I read a review on boingboing.net. When it arrived I found out that the author thought that Notes on the Underground was an essay on her collections of early proto-science and science fiction/fantasy novels and books. I got a similar experience with pictures of book covers from reading the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction. I found her writing to be dry and far too interested in quoting from 19th cent. texts - something that could be easily done by using google-text. After all there are numerous modern essays on real artificial environments, and even examples: ISS, aircraft carriers, etc...
Why not call the book - notes on books that mention the "underground" which were collected by querying googletext. I expected more from an MIT professor.