The Seal Book edition announces on its cover blurb a war pitting

This science fiction novel grabs attention with a very captivating complication. With a very clever turn on the trope of pathetic fallacy, its them-against-us situation quickly becomes a multi-sided problem. The unfolding of this fascinating complication is connected to a plot, a journey to control central, grafted onto a theme that implodes the very existence of centralised control. The sceptical moral of the story demonstrates that control of a world depends on control of a self (and that "control" is context sensitive).

The reader's awareness of the elegance of the artifice is induced by such passages at this one describing the psychological workings of one character:

Shirvanian rolled himself up into a corner of his bunk and sucked his thumb to blank out Mitzi's snoring, rain drumming, water trickling through the filtering system, bricks clunking.

Reason, instinct, emotion whirled round each other in his skull like an illustration of the three-body problem. He hated the weird kid's snotty brat's, insignificant ten-year-old's body he inhabited; he was aware that he had the emotions of a five-year-old child and was almost powerless to control them. The sun and center of these whirligigs's orbits was a hard bright faceted reasoning machine doomed to be fed by flesh and blood. Shirvanian hated the flesh dressed in the civil cloth of the worlds' inhabitants. Flesh kissed him for, pushed him toward, things that flesh wanted. Machines did what he wanted. Shirvanian was also aware of his monstrous ego; like many powerful minds, he was not unidirectional, but absorbed everything his senses brought him: he knew how emotional dynamics worked even if he could not operate his own, and sometimes his insight watched in horrified contempt while his body kicked and screamed.

Such a passage more than mechanically mirrors macro and micro levels, more than merely reflects the destiny of a group of characters as the internal drama of a single individual. It inserts instinct into the story of the struggle between emotion and reason. It suggests both reason and emotion are driven by instinct.

The three body problem is not unlike the game of chess played between a human and a replicant android. As the two Dhalgren's move pieces and exchange words, the game ceases to be a mirror of the present and becomes a model or a myth of the possible future. It is a fantastic scene for man and machine in the middle of a chess game are not only making promises but also discussing the nature of promises. The human says:

It takes a madman to make promises to machines. A stupid one to believe the promises of machines.

However stupid, however mad, humans do make promises through and upon the artifacts they build. It is not ironic that the solution to Shirvanian's problem (controlling his telepathic trances) comes by way of a set of promises to specific humans and specific machines. Indeed the paratext we cited above is incomplete. The blurb writer explicitly set limits to the conflict. In full, it reads, "Man & Mutant vs. Machine in the Erg War". A promise, like a war, cannot last forever. Indeed Gotlieb reminds us that promises can end wars. And the careful reader will find a thread that passes the instinct for reasoning with emotion through the machine of a promise.

Link to Phyllis Gotlieb's biography and bibliography http://www.interlog.com/~ccg/bio.html