Dyson became a Canadian citizen and spent 20 years in British Columbia, designing kayaks, researching historic voyages and native peoples, and exploring the Inside Passage.

[3] Dyson's first book, Baidarka, published in 1986, described his research on the history of the Aleutian kayak, its evolution in the hands of Russian fur traders, and his adaptation of its design to modern materials.

He is the author of Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship 1957–1965 and Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence, in which he expands upon the premise of Samuel Butler's 1863 article of the same name and suggests that the Internet is a living, sentient being.

It was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times 2012 Book Prize in the science and technology category[5] and was chosen by University of California Berkeley's annual "On the Same Page" program for the academic year 2013–14.

[8][9] Brian E. Blank noted in his review "[e]xtensive biographical and institutional backgrounds", and concludes it with:[10] It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Turing's Cathedral is an idiosyncratic, undisciplined, crazy quilt of a book.