Steve Tomasula is an American novelist, critic, short story, and essay author known for cross-genre narratives that explore conceptions of the self, especially as shaped by language and technology.

[5] His writing can be characterized as postmodern and has been called a "reinvention of the novel" for its formal inventiveness, play with language, and incorporation of visual imagery.

[9] It uses Abbott's characters Square and Circle and the flat, two-dimensional world in which they live to critique contemporary society during the rise of genetic engineering and other body manipulations.

It has been compared to George Orwell's Animal Farm for its class-consciousness as it follows the story of people trying to find a way to live authentically in a world where individuality is squeezed out by mass-market thought.

The overarching theme of representation and self-portraiture, from cave art to computer code, gives this novel a historical sweep that is breathtaking.

[33] Tomasula's novels are the subject of numerous scholarly and critical conference panels, essays and books, including The Body of Writing: An Erotics of Contemporary American Fiction by Flore Chevaillier,[34] How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis by N. Katherine Hayles,[35] Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First-Century Narrative by Torsa Ghosal,[36] The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism by Mary K. Holland,[37] Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English: Art of Crisis by Wojciech Drąg,[38] and Steve Tomasula: The Art and Science of New Media Fiction by David Banash.