Though Norbert Wiener was one of those 20th-century illuminati who ushered humankind into the age of intelligent machines, few people today know much about him. So whatever prompted Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman to write Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics, it wasn't any expectation of a bestseller. Wiener is past all likelihood of rescue by fashion. The authors must simply have been drawn to their subject by one of those virtuous impulses that are their own reward.

Dark Hero, Conway and Siegelman claim, was "eight years in the making and a dozen more in the planning." Alas, while their hearts may be in the right places, these authors turn out to be unable to think deeply or write well. Here, for instance, is the book's fourth paragraph: "This is the story of a dark hero who has fallen through the cracks in the information age and of his fight for human beings that is the stuff of legend." Things don't improve after that. For some months, however, Dark Hero may provide fodder for columns like this one. So while this inadequate book provides the occasion, let us seize it.