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ALLUCQU脡RE STONE is still by and large unknown in Europe, despite her contributions to Cyberspace: First Steps and Zone 6: Incorporations plus being involved in every international conference on cyberspace since 1991. From the press release that accompanies her new book, it transpires that she has also conducted research on the neurological basis of vision and hearing, worked as a computer programmer and manager in Silicon Valley and 鈥渨orked with Jimi Hendrix in music recording鈥�. She is now director of the Interactive Multimedia Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin.

War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, aspires to be as impressive as her prior achievements. In it, Stone discusses the way that new technologies challenge traditional views of personal identity. She suggests that the existing Western model of the sovereign subject will be totally undermined by our increasing ability to adopt different personae in virtual communities and by rapid improvements in transgender and prosthetic surgery.

The introduction comes at you like shrapnel. For readers acquainted with the twin peaks of Wired journalism and US academia, this should present no problem. But a structure that adheres to the spirit of HyperText and Web sites makes it no easier to read. She stresses subtleties of tone, and is quick to add that her 鈥渃entral ideas remain more or less unstated 鈥� hovering in the background鈥�. The subjects that do hover close enough to stop are various and of varying impact.

An overview of the development of virtual communities reappraises William Gibson鈥檚 Neuromancer before reporting on a trial in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in which a man is accused of raping a woman by seducing one of her multiple personalities. Stone questions the link between multiple personality disorder and mental illness, indicating that this condition will typify everyday life in the multiple-user virtual communities on the Internet. The Oshkosh incident is then neatly contrasted with the story of the 鈥渃ross-dressing psychiatrist鈥�, Stanford Lewin.

In 1982, Lewin opened an account with CompuServe, using the name Julie Graham and giving her the persona of a mute, paraplegic victim of a car crash. 鈥淪he鈥� had been on the brink of suicide, but having gone online she blossomed and became the pearl of the quarter. For Lewin, camouflaging Julie鈥檚 nonexistence became a nightmare. He dreamed of ways he could kill her off and get back to his day job. But as Julie lay at death鈥檚 door, her online admirers deluged her address with electronic grapes. Lewin despaired 鈥� and backed down. 鈥淲hat do you do when your imaginary playmate makes friends better than you do?鈥� Form a discussion group, presumably.

There is much to admire in subsequent stories, such as how an early bulletin board service in San Francisco in the 1970s broke down under the heavy traffic of abusive language e-mailed by adolescents. A recounting of the rise and fall of Pac-Man and the Atari Lab dovetails with a challenge to Wellspring Systems, whose game programmers are 100 per cent male. Why do computer games cater so badly for women? 鈥淧eople don鈥檛 want plot,鈥� says Memphis Smith, producer of Battle Commander at Wellspring. 鈥淭hey just want to shoot things.鈥� Stone keeps her cool and makes some wry observations on the game market and 鈥渢he ludic dimension of human-computer interaction鈥� wondering whether this sexism is something we have to learn to live with.

Stone fires off a number of ideas that relate to changing modes of representation, the personal and the collective, but having done so she frequently fails to follow them through. This and the structure of the book meant I found the whole thing frustrating. It is great to see somebody try to apply the idioms of avant-garde composition to the printed page, but overall the book is less of a performance and more of a puzzle whose parts, once reconstructed, leave a shape too slight to bear the burden of their implications.

If the focus remains blurred, don鈥檛 be put off: the whole fights tooth and nail with the sum of the parts. Nevertheless, aspiring cyber surfers may be better off reading Susan Sontag鈥檚 1963 essay 鈥淭he anthropologist as hero鈥�. The frontier is not what it seems. All the time I鈥檓 reminded of a line from the new Tricky record, The Hell E. P.: 鈥淎re you someone else? Because I鈥檓 me.鈥�