SOURCE: "The Systems Novel," in The New Republic, Vol. 198, No. 17, April 25, 1988, pp. 40-2.

LeClair is an American writer and educator. In the following review of Prisoner's Dilemma, he states that "Powers is the most accomplished practitioner" of what he calls "the 'systems novel,' a fiction that uses postmodern techniques to model the dense and tangled relations of modern history, politics, and science."

Too few words have been written by and too many about the carved-down school of fiction, 1980s minimalism. Richard Powers's second novel, Prisoner's Dilemma, offers an excellent occasion to identify those novelists first publishing in the decade who fill the gaps the minimalists leave in their fiction and in our literary environment. Among writers such as John Calvin Batchelor (The Further Adventures of Halley's Comet, The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica), Ron Loewinsohn (Magnetic Field(s), Where All the Ladders Start), Ted Mooney...