Search Results for: computer-world

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.

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.

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)

Something is rotten in tomorrow’s computer world¿

The time is in the not-too-distant future. Physical work is done by robot devices. Men and women are endowed at birth with a sum of credit called Inalienable Basic. Everyone operates with a Universal Credit Card – which is also identification, police record, medical record, and many other things. Every detail of life in the United States of the Americas is stored in the International Data Center, located in Denver.

Paul Kosloff, a language teacher who lectures over National Tri-Vision is rescued from a mysterious assault by a secret agent of the authorities who insists that only he, Kosloff, can prevent the International Data Center from being destroyed – and every living being’s data wiped out.

Kosloff goes forth – into a maelstrom of plot and counter-plot, murder, treason – and worse¿

GUNS WERE ILLEGAL

Unless you were a member of Category Military, no one on Earth could own a gun. So who was shooting at Joe Mauser? And why?

He’d been a mercenary, but he’d been thrown out when he saved Field Marshal Cogswell’s life. Whose enemies were after him now – his own, or Cogswell’s?

In a world where the computers kept track of you, Mauser had to disappear – and stay alive long enough to reach the Field Marshal!

Arcot, Wade, Morey, and their computer, Fuller, put together a ship which will travel faster than light; they gave us what may have been the first space-warp drive. The concept was simple, to make it plausible wasn’t – unless you were John W. Campbell.

With this out-of-space drive they hightail it among the stars. They locate the fugitive planets of the Black Star, find a frozen cemetery-world of a lost race, then head out for another galaxy and wind up in a knock-down-drag-out interplanetary war!

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.