The book does not seek to fit within the dialectic of modernists and postmodernists who see the information society as a place that, like Milton’s mind, makes ‘a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven’ (Paradise Lost 225). Rather it aims for the mode of Drexler’s (1990) Engines of Creation, which gave impetus to the study of nanotechnology by arguing the possibility of having machines and computers at the level of molecules and then describing the consequences for society of realising that possibility.