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Realspace: The fate of physical presence in the digital age, on and off planet by Paul Levinson, Routledge, 拢13.99/$21.95, ISBN 0415277434 Reviewed by Wendy M. Grossman

WALKING and talking rhyme for a reason, or so Paul Levinson argues in Realspace. Improvement in technologies of transportation and those of communication should go hand in hand. Victorian engineers made bicycles and railways extend our physical reach, while the telegraph speeded up communications. Then came air travel and the telephone.

Levinson pleads for the virtuality of the internet to be matched by improved travel into the sensuality of realspace. Then he proposes that this should be outer space 鈥� which by all accounts tastes of metal, mould and fear. Why space? It鈥檚 a frontier: 鈥淭he only way forward from California is up.鈥�

It would, he concludes, be a fitting memorial for the World Trade Center if ground zero were to be used as a rocket launching pad. How could launches be carried out safely in such a highly populated area? Easy. Wait until (in the distant future) we have anti-gravity drives.

Levinson鈥檚 career mixes works on media theory such as Digital McLuhan and online graduate courses with science fiction. He thinks that the government funded space travel but not the internet (wrong), that the anti-trust case against Microsoft was ill-advised because the company might be able to fund space travel, that (benevolent) dictatorships would be better at funding space travel than democracies, and that religious leaders should be recruited to proselytise the space message.

If this book were an email message, you would back away, slowly.