Search Results for: computer-world

A cyber-dystopian thriller unlike any other.

In a near future Tokyo, every action-from blinking to sexual intercourse-is intellectual property owned by corporations that charge licensing fees. A BodyBank computer system implanted in each citizen records their movements from moment to moment, and connects them to the audio-visual overlay of the ImmaNet, so that every inch of this cyber-dystopian metropolis crawls with information and shifting cinematic promotainment.

Amon Kenzaki works as a Liquidator for the Global Action Transaction Authority. His job is to capture bankrupt citizens, remove their BodyBank, and banish them to BankDeath Camps where they are forever cut off from the action-transaction economy. Amon always plays by the rules and is steadily climbing the Liquidation Ministry ladder.

With his savings accumulating and another promotion coming, everything seems to be going well, until he is asked to cash crash a charismatic politician and model citizen, and soon after is charged for an incredibly expensive action called “jubilee” that he is sure he never performed. To restore balance to his account, Amon must unravel the secret of jubilee, but quickly finds himself asking dangerous questions about the system to which he’s devoted his life, and the costly investigation only drags him closer and closer to the pit of bankruptcy.

In book one of the Jubilee Cycle, Cash Crash Jubilee, debut novelist Eli K. P. William wields the incisive power of speculative fiction to show how, in a world of corporate finance run amok, one man will do everything for the sake of truth and justice.

In medical student August Seebeck’s world, almost identical to ours, there are eleven months in a year. None of them is the month of August-until now, when the young orphan stumbles into the true, infinite universe, and becomes a Player in the Game of Worlds. And step by deranged step he meets his siblings: Avril, Decius, Jan, Jules, Maybelline, Septimus/Septima who is both male and female, Toby, the others. And outside his family, glorious, brilliant Lune, also a Player, is quickly his lover, with dreadful secrets of her own.


These diverse warriors of the multiverse confront the terrible K-machines, who detest and slaughter humans… but then are the Seebeck family really human? What are these silver symbols engraved into their flesh? What is the true nature of the unending, unfolding cosmos, a meta-reality built from ontological computation, Lune’s doctoral specialty? And how can August slay the looming Jabberwock using only the Sun-blazing Vorpal implant in his hand? What final transformation awaits the multiverse at Yggdrasil Station, at the death and dawn of spacetime, where all the heroes die and live again? In this astounding helter-skelter two-part novel, the answers to such questions emerge along a twisting path that will not set you free until you sit with August at a great thirteen-sided table and learn his destiny, and perhaps your own.

Charles Forbin has dedicated the last 10 years of his life to the construction of his own supercomputer, Colossus, rejecting romantic and social endeavours in order to create the United States’ very first Artificially Intelligent defence system.

But Colossus soon exceeds even Forbin’s calculated expectations, learning to think independently of the Colossus Programming Office, processing data over 100 times faster than Forbin and his team had originally anticipated.

The President hands off full control of the nation’s missiles and other defence protocols to Colossus and makes the announcement to the world that he has ensured peace. However, the USSR quickly announces that it too has a supercomputer, Guardian, with capabilities similar to that of Colossus.

Forbin is concerned when Colossus asks – asks – to communicate with Guardian.

The computer he built shouldn’t be able to ask at all…

George Sanford has a gift for guessing right the first time and very little else going for him. When Ahmed and his other friends graduate school and got jobs in The City, George finds himself left behind. He never wanted to sign his name, let alone fill out applications and reports.

Then George bumps into the Rescue Squad and is swept up in the excitement of a hunt for a trapped girl. It is George who finds her with his special talent for guessing right … and it is George who suddenly becomes the pride of the Rescue Squad. With a friend running interference for him with the bureaucracy, George lands a place for himself as a “consultant” – and the more he works, the more his strange talents grow.

With each success George begins to change. Using his special talents to rescue a computer technician from a gang of revolutionaries, he finds he has become a pawn in a mad iconoclastic game. A game where his own talents pose the greatest threat to The City – and the world!

Krells never set out to be a hero. He was the first to admit he was a trader. “In it for the money; I leave thinking to the experts.” But the experts couldn’t solve the problem of Ralcor IX.

Professional fighters and scientific investigators vanished or were mysteriously destroyed. The robot might of an armoured Bellicose 35 was found shredded like tinsel. Krells still refused to think of himself as hero material – but he wouldn’t quit. Martia, his computer girl, and Galor, the despatch man, stayed with him. For some reason the power that had driven every other terrestrial humanoid off Ralcor IX couldn’t dislodge the traders. Krells groped desperately for a reason. Finding one meant the return of his own people and that meant money. Something he couldn’t understand was shielding him from the Unknown Menace. Suppose he accidentally stopped doing whatever it was that protected him…?

Most people would have become neurotic and quit – not Krells. He didn’t seem to have enough intelligence or imagination to know when to worry.

These seventeen classic stories create their own unique galaxy of vain, protective, and murderous robots; devilish angels; and warm and angry aliens. In “Mimsy Were the Borogoves”-the inspiration for New Line Cinema’s major motion picture The Last Mimzy-a boy finds a discarded box containing a treasure trove of curious objects. When he and his sister begin to play with these trinkets-including a crystal cube that magnifies the unimaginable and a strange doll with removable organs that don’t quite correspond to those of the human body-their parents grow concerned. And they should be. For the items are changing the way the children think and perceive the world around them-for better or worse.

Ray Bradbury called Henry Kuttner “a man who shaped science fiction and fantasy in its most important years.” Marion Zimmer Bradley and Roger Zelazny said he was a major inspiration. Kuttner was a writer’s writer whose visionary works anticipated our own computer-controlled, machine-made world. At the time of his death at forty-two in 1958, he had created as many as 170 stories under more than a dozen pseudonyms-sometimes writing entire issues of science fiction magazines-in close collaboration with his wife, C. L. Moore.

This definitive collection will be a revelation to those who wish to discover or rediscover Henry Kuttner, a true master of the universe.

D.G. Compton is best known for his prescient 1974 novel, THE CONTINUOUS KATHERINE MORTENHOE, which predicted the 21st century’s obsessions with media voyeurism and ‘reality television’. It was filmed as DEATH WATCH in 1980 by Bertrand Tavernier. This omnibus collects three of his incisive SF novels, ASCENDANCIES, SYNTHAJOY and THE STEEL CROCODILE.

ASCENDANCIES: Into a future where a depleted fuel supply had the world spiralling down into grinding poverty and constant war came … Moondrift. Mysterious white flakes of alien matter that was the perfect fuel – clean, powerful, dependable. But the aliens – or whatever they were – who sent Moondrift seemed to demand a heavy ransom in return…

SYNTHAJOY: Would you like to experience first-hand the emotions of a great artist, the sublime peace of a saint, the happiness of a child at Christmas? Try Sensitape. Or perhaps you had something more passionate in mind. Don’t be shy. Ask for Sexitape. And for the true connoisseur, we have the ultimate human experience: a distinguished blend of synthetic ecstasies. The world is not ready for it, but perhaps you are. We call it Synthajoy.

THE STEEL CROCODILE: In answer to an unanswerable future, science has created Bohn, the omnipotent computer whose flashing circuits and messianic pronouncements dictate what tomorrow will – or will not – be. But Matthew Oliver is flesh and blood and full of questions – not nearly as certain as the machine he’s appointed to serve. And the right hand of science seldom knows what the left hand is doing…

Why is the government deliberately destroying all trace of Man’s past?

Why are the laws of gravity and momentum strangely altered?

Why has the world’s population continually increased without the predicted eco-crisis taking place?

Why is there an international conspiracy to conceal the future of the human race?

These are just some of the reality-shattering questions that face Manalone, a brilliant computer scientist, when he tries to find out exactly what has happened to humanity. Manalone, outcast from society, must fight the entire machinery of a ruthless police state to discover the truth. And the truth is an awful, chilling one, that sounds only too real in today’s world.

Homicide – or cosmic catastrophe?


Detective Vernon Moody is a modern cop who likes to catch killers the modern way – with computer webs, databases and common sense.


So he’s not happy when his latest case revolves around the supposedly mystical properties of a lost Navaho sandpainting. Or when the painting leads him to suspect an alien presence in his modern world.


No Moody’s getting scared and what started out as a routine murder investigation may uncover the very nature of reality – or destroy it forever!

The ultimate maquiladora. Montezuma Strip: First World tech and Third World wages, sprawling from L.A. to East Elpaso Juarez, Guyamas to Phoenix; a thousand gangs, a million locos; and a few wealthy beyond the dreams of gods…


And Federale Angel Cardenas, a living lie detector, is a top cop on the blistering streets of virtual reality scams and cryogenic kidnaps, where talking animals are programmed to kill, computer screens can spit murder, and even the Holy Blessed Virgin’s ghost runs extortion rackets.


Once Angel Cardenas was blind. But now he sees…straight into the heart of darkness that rules…


MONTEZUMA STRIP

“Mankind will cease to exist at 6pm GMT on 28th March 3256”. A computer prediction which threw the world into panic. What to do? Build a starship and take the chosen few to a new home in the stars. Or search for an alternative timestream where mankind goes on forever.

Matt Helm is to captain the last space shuttle carrying passengers to the starship, but his irrepressible desire for Fern Angelus corrupts his sense of duty. He agrees to take part in her time experiments.

Set against a background of passion and longing, Matt’s uncanny success with mind projection meets unforseen complications. He projects his mind to a future Earth: a world of shallow, extensive seas, mutated trees growing in layers on each other’s branches, and strangely evolved animals like snappersnouts, humpers and energy creatures.

Matt’s strange visions eventually meet reality when he discovers that the last load of passengers for the starship has been left behind; and he is one of them.

An all-powerful computer takes control of a great metropolis as a man and a woman are drawn into a love affair that may save – or destroy – their world.

This is the story of how a world could be resurrected¿

Mars is a barren planet, almost without atmosphere and with a temperature ranging from near zero to 120 degrees below. No water flows and there is no evidence that life has ever existed there.

Yet Mars is Earth’s near neighbour and has always exerted a powerful hold on our imagination. The astronomer Lowell thought he’d discovered canals on the planet’s surface; H.G. wells (and his near namesake Orson) speculated on the red planet’s inhabitants invading Earth; sf writers have always used Mars as a setting and continue to do so.

In the Snows of Olympus Arthur C. Clarke uses a revolutionary computer program to show, in words and pictures, how the surface of the planet would change as, gradually, scientists created an atmosphere and raised the temperature. Taking as his starting point Olympus Mons, the highest mountain in the Solar System, a 27km extinct volcano, Clarke creates detailed ‘photographs’ of the Martian surface and then shows how the landscape would change as vegetation began to thrive and water to flow. He speculates about how this might happen, about the journey to Mars and about what living on the planet would be like. The result is one of the most fascinating, challenging and imaginatively stimulating books of the year.

Arthur C. Clarke has long been hailed as the most visionary and accurate of science fiction and non-fiction writers, having predicted communications satellites years before their development. In this extraordinary booked he chart the next chapter of humanity’s future in space.

‘You are an artificially constructed human being, a mobile gathering device.’
That is what the computer’s metallic voice tells Tanner when it releases him from his cell. Naked, unarmed, with no memory to guide him, he emerges into a savage world, into the ruins of Manhattan in the 23rd century where wild animals roam and men have become cannibals in a frantic struggle to survive.

Who has unleashed this chaos upon the world? Has Tanner really been dispatched to gather facts to help save the tragic remnants of humanity? Or is he to be the final instrument of its destruction?

Earth was programmed for destruction in the mad war of the computer worlds – unless the Solarians could stop the machines!

Three hundred years ago the Solarians retreated to the safety of their Fortress as Earth became embroiled in the first of the computer wars with the dread Duglaari Empire.

The Solarians’ final word to all humanity was a promise to reappear one day and bring it to victory. Suddenly, with Earth on the verge of becoming a helpless victim of the merciless Duglaars, the Solarians made contact with Fleet Commander Jay Palmer. It was an offer of aid.

But the Solarians’ plan was so cunning, so fraught with danger, that Jay faced the greatest decision of his life – and that of Earth’s:

Accept their ingenious strategy as a stroke of genius or reject it as a trick designed to destroy human life forever.

It lay in the grass, tiny and white and burning. He stooped, put out his fingers. And then there was nothing. Nothing but darkness and oblivion. A split second demolition of the world of Richard Avery.
From a damp February afternoon in Kensington Gardens, Avery is precipitated into a world of apparent unreason. A world in which his intelligence is tested by computers, and which he is finally left on a strange tropical island with three companions, and a strong human desire to survive.

But then the mystery deepens: for there are two moons in the sky, and the rabbits have six legs, and there is a physically satisfying reason for the entire situation.

Annihilating everything before it, a horde of monstrous space travellers were advancing through the stars. And Earth lay in their route. To defend their home planets, the worlds that lay in the path of the monsters created a super defence force, asking each planet to contribute one especially talented warrior to help turn the invaders away. Miles Vander was Earth’s man, but when he arrived at the rendezvous point he found that he was included in the special task force of the less civilized defenders.

But in the contest of advanced nuclear weaponry and computer strategy, it turned out to be Vander’s group that had the special independent qualities and the raw courage to meet the challenge most effectively.

From the vaults of The SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal introduction to the razor-sharp wit of John Sladek.

An important voice in the New Wave movement, Sladek had stories published in Harlan Ellison’s seminal anthology, DANGEROUS VISIONS, as well as in Michael Moorcock’s ground-breaking NEW WORLDS magazine. Perhaps best known for the ambitious robot tales RODERICK and RODERICK AT RANDOM, he is now recognized as one of SF’s most brilliant satirists. This omnibus collects novels THE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM, THE MULLER-FOKKER EFFECT and BSFA AWARD-winning TIK-TOK.

THE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM: Wompler’s Walking Babies aren’t selling like they used to, so the company develops Project 32, producing self-replicating mechanisms designed to repair inter-cellular breakdowns. But then the metal boxes begin crawling about the laboratory, feeding voraciously on metal and multiplying…

THE MULLER-FOKKER EFFECT: Bob Shairp – a writer and dreamer – has agreed to be a guinea-pig in a military experiment to find out if his personality can be turned into data and stored on computer. But a computing error quickly destroys Shairp’s physical body, leaving his mind stranded in an encoded world. Can the process be reversed?

TIK-TOK: Something has gone very seriously wrong with Tik-Tok’s ‘asimov circuits’. They should keep him on the straight and narrow, following Asimov’s First Law of Robotics: ‘a robot shall not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.’ But they don’t. While maintaining the outward appearance of a mild-mannered robot, albeit one with artistic tendencies and sympathy for the robot rights movement, Tik-Tok’s real agenda is murderously different. He seems intent on injuring – preferably fatally – as many people as possible. Almost inevitably, a successful career in crime and general mayhem leads to a move into politics and Tik-Tok becomes the first robot candidate for Vice President of the United States.

Given: Earth 400 years from now – a rotten society which mankind is doomed to die out.

A solution to the problem – an ultra-intelligent computer to govern humanity.

One man of seemingly average intelligence, but with incredible I.Q. potential.

And you have: A corrupt society turned into a world where there is no corruption, because Mother Machine knows what’s best for her human children and does it. Where that same all-powerful computer is rapidly turning men into zombies.

And where the world’s only hope turns out to be one outlawed not-average man.

Ace Lieutenant Dominic Flandry was not a man easily swayed from his duty to the Empire; not, that is, until galactic vice king Leon Ammon offered him a million-credit bribe, a voluptuous woman called Djana, and a chance to explore a dark and treasure-laden moon.

Yet within the desolate peaks and valleys of that strange world of ice and shadows, Flandry found more than he had bargained for. Supposedly barren, the planet swarmed with a hideous race of strange, inhuman creatures, infernally controlled by a deranged and brilliant computer brain. Each, like a piece in a bizarre and vicious chess game, was programmed to kill. And although Flandry did not know it – so was the woman he loved.

Space-wanderer Earl Dumarest is on the planet Toy to consult the giant computer which may contain information on the whereabouts of Earth, his lost home-world.

But soon he realises Toy is a place that gives away nothing for free. Before Dumarest can gain the information he needs, he must take part in the Toy Games – must fight like a tin soldier in a vast nursery.

And there is nothing playful about the Games on Toy. The pain is real enough; the wounds, the blood – and death.



(First published 1969)

The computer had chosen them – a small cross-section of humanity to serve Mankind’s Destiny. Out of seven billion people on Earth mechanical chance had selected them as involuntary colonists on an unknown planet. In seven days they would be on their way, on a sink-or-swim mission to a lonely world beyond the limits of the Solar System.

It was a summons each had privately dreaded, yet always been prepared for. But no one had prepared them for the vicious attacks of sinister aliens . . .

Hour by hour, the computers produce the names of those to die. Simple. Neat. Ruthless.

In a world where human feelings seem frozen, one spirit flares with defiance and hope . . . while two powerful brothers fight their old blood feud to a brutal climax.

And hurtling through space . . . a lost explorer desperately tries to reach earth with word of a new paradise for man beyond the stars . . .




(First published 1957)

A hard-living reporter long past his Pulitzer Prize-winning prime, Chuck Vallone is about to meet a renowned geneticist who needs to clear his conscience. But when Vallone arrives at their rendezvous, he finds the D.C. hotel swarming with government agents. The scientist’s room is now a grisly slaughterhouse splattered with blood – but no sign of a body.


Vallone knows he has the story of the century, especially when he receives a mysterious package filled with a computer disk and strange samples of DNA. Now he’s determined to uncover the truth. But it’s no brave new world Vallone will be exploring; rather, a deadly depraved one ruled by preeminent scientists. And this powerful cadre intends to make Vallone both eyewitness and executor of their final ferocious plan…