 Baird Searles, in "Asimov's Science Fiction" (April 1984), says "the book lies in the uneasy boundary between surrealism and fantasy, given an odd literary status by its masquerade as a book of fact".Douglas Hofstadter, in "Metamagical Themas", finds many of the illustrations "grotesque and disturbing" and others "extremely beautiful and visionary".He says the book "seems to [some people] to glorify entropy, chaos, and incomprehensibility".