Do you remember virtual reality? No, not just recent movies like "Existenz" and "The Matrix" -- I mean do you remember a decade back when virtual reality was the next big thing?

In the early '90s, VR technology had produced only some fuzzy prototypes. But the primitive state of the art didn't embarrass its promoters, who were heralding the advent of full-fledged computer-generated immersion environments to be generally available "around the turn of the century." According to the hype, computer users would no longer peer into the monitor like the Little Match Girl. Virtual reality promised to dissolve the interface between "user" and "world." When we booted up a VR system, developers promised, screen and desktop would dissolve and we'd seem to be there ourselves.

There was always some philosophical confusion, of course, about why being there would be any better than being here. But we never got there anyway, and we don't seem to miss it. Huddled at our edge of the millennial divide, we're happy, thanks to the World Wide Web, to stay home and order out.

So why, I wondered, would Richard Powers set "Plowing the Dark," his seventh novel, in a VR lab during the late '80s and early '90s? What interest could an overhyped and underachieving technology hold for a novelist who's taken on challenges as various as cognitive science (in "Galatea 2.2"), the DNA code (in "The Gold Bug Variations") and, most recently (in "Gain"), the history of the American corporation? Why squander a prodigious ability to wed metaphor to scientific language on material you can read about in a seven-year-old issue of Wired?

And do we really want to follow a fairly generic group of techies through 400 pages? I wasn't sure I did at the beginning, when Adie Klarpol, artist and emotional burnout, considers joining a team of VR designers in a Seattle start-up called the Realization Lab. Adie gets to state all the requisite antitech arguments, to register amazement at the moods and meshugas of Realization's hobbit-like denizens and, in record time, to tumble for the seductions of simulated space.

Luckily, we're seduced as well, because that's about it for the plot setup. The Realization programmers, engineers, mathematicians and designers are mostly interchangeable walking woundeds and socially stunteds, but what we watch them make is achingly beautiful. Their first prototype, a 3-D simulation of the jungle in Henri Rousseau's painting "The Dream," is a riot of joyous creation both in its rendered images and (at simulation's second remove) in the words that render the images:

Through the Jungle Room, birds wing at liberty. Define a feather when condemned to the wind. Say how the shaft tapers, straining to be weightless. Describe what the vanes do on the air, how they luff and ruffle and flute …

Their speculations about the political import of what they're doing are equally lovely and extravagant. I'll confess that I'd all but forgotten the flashes of loony technological optimism that accompanied world events like the Tianenmen Square demonstrations and the demolition of the Berlin Wall. "Maybe the spreading world machine was catalyzing this mass revolution," Spider, the team's hardware guy, muses. "Maybe silicon seeds had planted in the human populace an image of its own potential." The vision, briefly shared by cultural-studies radicals and hippie technomystics, went something like this: If you could only see the world -- if by building a complex enough simulation you could apprehend it both in its wholeness and in its working parts -- then maybe you could fix it. Maybe computers could help us to find, to create (in Powers' words) "places where we can change all the rules, one at a time, to see what happens."

Or maybe not. Maybe, as Ellen Ullman observes in the May issue of Harpers, what's happened instead is a radical narrowing of vision and aspiration. Does anybody think nowadays that, with the help of technology, we can change all the rules? Does anybody think of much at all beyond the solipsistic and infantile "my computer, my Yahoo, my my my"?

I don't know if Powers would see it that way, but I do think he intends us to consider the present that's rooted in the past he explores. "Plowing the Dark" is like near-future cyberpunk science fiction in a fun-house mirror: Powers evokes utopian technological aspirations of the near past and allows his readers to draw their own conclusions about the present.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"