The novel features Valentina, a computer program that is one of science fiction's earliest examples of sentient software, in contrast to mainframe-based AIs such as HAL and Colossus.
The heroine of "The Gentle Seduction" is a normal woman whose very elemental connection with her own identity is key in soothing humanity's jarring experience of finally meeting an alien mind.
Marc Stiegler's novel Earthweb envisions a future where computers are immune to attacks, the Web has evolved to largely replace government as the foundation of human civilization, and prediction markets are utilized to make informed decisions about significant future events.
His non-fiction piece, "Hypermedia and the Singularity", predated the advent of the Web and postulated that hypertext would play a pivotal role in accelerating knowledge evolution.
Shortly after penning this article, he assumed management[2][3] of Project Xanadu, the hypertext system envisioned by Ted Nelson.