Computers have affected human society as few other inventions in the past century have. As literature generally tends to reflect the nature and self-image of the society that produces it, it is but natural that the advent and widespread use of computers have had a large impact on contemporary literature.

One of the most significant effects of computers is the arrival of computers in literature. The genre of science fiction was in some senses started by the British authoress Mary Shelley in the early 19th century with her renowned classic Frankenstein, but it caught on in a big way only in the 1930s and later. The science fiction produced in any generation tends to reflect the beliefs and knowledge, scientific or otherwise, of its time (for instance, science fiction written in the late 1940s and early 1950s sometimes described characters safely living through exposures...