"Kids: the pioneers or the patsies of today's computer culture?

"This is the story of a love affair with youth and computer culture and America. It explores the desires of the digital age, and searches the on-line world and the techno scene for clues about the nature of the coming generation.

"Hard, Soft and Wet is an intimate diary of enchantment and disillusion, an outsider's voyage into an alien culture. Moving between London and San Francisco (with side trips to Wales, New York, Boston, Moscow, Singapore, Prague, Berlin and Reykjavik), Melanie McGrath pieces together a composite portrait of a generation at play. She meets hackers, skip-raiders, e-mail junkies, road protestors, cybervisionaries, VR babies, virus writers, technomads, neo-Luddites, ambient DJs, arcade champs, sippies, slot freaks, software marketeers and swarms of self-styled geeks.

"In thrall to her dream of America, both as a place and as a symbol of this brave new era, Melanie McGrath scrambles to stake her own claim on the Electronic Frontier, and confronts on the way the delights, contradictions and false promises of the binary world.

"McGrath is one of the best possible tour guides to this new territory. Amused, bemused and confused, at times scathingly funny, she strips down the culture into its constituent impulses, its code, and refashions it for us in surprising and refreshing bites. Acid-sharp and rave-fuelled, McGrath is open, engaged and curious, never distant or dismissive.

"This is one of the first books to move beyond hype and backlash, thesis and counter-claim, to give instead a wry and considered portrait of this new emerging landscape." [jacket blurb, UK hbk, 1997]

"McGrath has a fine, questing mind, a splendid eye for detail and a healthily cynical attitude." -- (in Financial Times ).

"I just bought a copy, so no review yet." --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , February 1998).