SOURCE: A review of The Gold Bug Variations, in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XII, No. 1, Spring, 1992, p. 145.

In the following review, Tabbi states that The Gold Bug Variations "merits serious attention from writers and scientists."

Early in The Gold Bug Variations, in one of many scenes in the novel where characters lose themselves in libraries, the young scientist Stuart Ressler makes "a sadly vindicating tour" of the University of Illinois library that reveals "an 824," the Dewey Decimal designation for literature, "untouched since Henry James died. Humanities have clearly slid into the terminally curatorial, forsaking claim to knowledge." This is 1957, and Ressler is in Illinois to push ahead with the genetic coding research that Watson and Crick initiated in England a few years before. Ressler's task, like Powers's in the telling of this story, is to sort through a mass of discoveries, competing hypotheses, and sheer data...