One Is the Loneliest Number is full of ironies. For instance, Roddy notes that "if you were careful and thoughtful, you could find a way to make a computer user's persona sick," yet what he is not is "careful and thoughtful." Instead, he is self-absorbed, an immature teenager who does not think beyond his own immediate feelings. Besides, he is not half as clever as he thinks he is—readers are likely to have figured out what he was up to long before it is revealed.

One Is the Loneliest Number ventures into some tricky philosophical territory, main taining that "the experience of the mind, finally, was virtual. It experienced nothing directly. Everything was filtered through the senses, even as virtual experience had to come to the mind via the computer interface's manipulation of those senses." In Roddy's view, there is a "mind-body interface"; that...