It concerns three men about to be executed. They are all granted one last wish. The first admits to sins during his life and asks for a priest. The second explains he is a professor of cybernetics. His last wish is to deliver a final and definitive answer to the question: what is cybernetics? And the third man? He is a doctoral student of the professor and his last wish is to be executed second.

The term 'cybernetics' has a futuristic other-world taint to it, but the neologism was coined in the 1940s by the nerdishly named Norbert Wiener, an eccentric American MIT mathematician and philosopher, portrayed by Rid as brilliant but a bumbling egoist. Rid explains how Wiener was declared a 'prophet of the second industrial revolution' by Time magazine when Wiener published his book Cybernetics: Or control and communication in the animal and the machine (1948). Rid, interpreting Wiener's insights, writes: 'In the first revolution, engines and production machines had replaced human muscle: now in the second revolution, control mechanisms would replace human brains.'

Leslie Illingworth’s 'Friend or Foe?' Cartoon in the June 29, 1955 issue of Punch magazine (Punch Limited)Rid argues that 'cybernetics was a general theory of machines, a curious postwar scientific discipline that sought to master the swift rise of computerised progress'. He then traces the evolution of cybernetics from its beginnings when it emerged as a direct response to the German war machine during the London Blitz. Rid identifies the benchmark leaps of the blurred anastomosis of machine and human control and how this is managed via the agency of negative feedback. Rid identifies the practitioners who expanded cybernetics across their various disciplines. There was Elmer A. Sperry who invented products specifically designed to give machines better control; Julian Bigelow who, with Wiener, attempted to predict pilot behaviour; W. Ross Ashby, the English psychiatrist who, in the early 1950s, invented the 'Homeostat', a 'thinking' machine, 'the closest thing to a synthetic human brain so far designed by man'; and Alice May Hilton, a brilliant mathematician who in 1963 articulated the idea of 'cyberculture'.

Then came Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a prescient film about technological progress and machines acquiring human characteristics; Clarke was heavily influenced by Wiener. Donna Haraway frightened everyone with her notion that anyone with a pacemaker was in fact a 'cyborg'. Cybernetics generated more and more portmanteau names as its field of influence expanded.

Rid also assures us in his earlier dissertation Cyber War Will Not Take Place (2012) that there is nothing to fear from cybernetics. Rid confirms that 'cyber war has never happened in the past, that cyber war does not take place in the present, and that it is unlikely that cyber war will occur in the future'.

Rid's subtitle, The lost history of cybernetics suggests that if the history is 'lost' then this text by logical extension offers to find it for us; this is a tacit promise kept. Rid delivers with a text accessible to the layman in the same way that Richard Dawkins weaves his compelling style into his rainbow theories of delusion and Stephen Hawking did in A Brief History of Time (1988).

A model poses with a cybernetic anthropomorphous machines (or CAM) built in 1962 by General Electric for the US Air Force to handle radioactive material for nuclear aircraft propulsion.In the last chapter, which bears the title 'Fall of the Machines', Rid opens with an obvious, if trite and overworked, religious metaphor: 'First came the promise, then the rise, and finally the fall of the machines.' This indulgence aside, it is the chronological revelations and the players that reveal a working understanding of cybernetics. It takes a book like Rid's to comprehend that just as postmodernism ranges over many disciplines, so to does cybernetics.

In prosecuting his case, Rid evokes the prescient fictional work of William Gibson, who coined the term 'cyberspace', and Verner Vinge, whose novella True Names (1981) deals with gaming and encryption, and privacy incursions. Rid underpins his work with references to the literary theory of Roland Barthes, the cultural anthropological genius of Margaret Mead, Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (1970), and Ayn Rand's sociological and philosophical fiction. Even L. Ron Hubbard created a religion out of cybernetics. This is not Rid's exhaustive list of influencers on the subject, but it serves the view that cybernetics is, as a master narrative with an inbuilt automatic feedback loop, relevant and influential across many spheres, including the humanities and pop culture.

In the main, the book is well written. It is not, nor was it meant to be, a scientific dissertation per se. Rid can be a garrulous writer, but in spite of his occasional prose affectations, as a key to understanding the 'rise of the machines' and history of cybernetics Rid's text is seminal.