Doing so involves multiple trips between New York and England, including a visit to the Hebrides and the Stones of Callanish, and increasing danger and death.

Larry McCaffery ranked Lookout Cartridge 39th in his top 100 20th-century English novels list.

The separate scenes are: The language of film, computer technology, information theory, and liquid crystals permeate the novel.

The sentences were made deliberately labyrinthine, meant to be on the edge of incomprehensibility, yet to always feel as if significant clues had to be present.

He starts by stating that he recalls some French writer "arguing that fiction can't compete with film in visual immediacy."