 "New York Times" reviewer Gerald Jonas reported that Bester tried, but failed, "to make arbitrariness a virtue" in "The Computer Connection", concluding that the novel "cannot possibly be as much fun" for the reader as it was for the writer.Arthur D. Hlavaty, a former editor of "The New York Review of Science Fiction", wrote that the book gave "an unintentional example of his own theme of the unrecoverability of the past.His long-awaited novel, variously called "The Indian Giver", "Extro", and "The Computer Connection", was a major disappointment—a confused farrago of old ideas and gimmicks."