henry (03/17/83)
Caidin's novel "Cyborg", on which the TV series was loosely based, actually wasn't bad. Not great -- Caidin's books never are -- but tolerable, unlike the TV version. (A warning, however: when the theme started to catch on, he tried to write a sequel, which was dreadful.) The book which prompted Geo Swan's comment, "The God Machine", similarly falls under the heading of "not great, but readable". It's one of his better books, which unfortunately says something about the quality of his work. Considering the technological side, the book is poor; Caidin did enough research to get the patter right but not enough to know what's practical and what isn't. On the other hand, the overall theme is well-done and plausible. One thing that is quite well-done and rather novel is that Caidin has found a way to make the hoary old computer-tries-to-take-over-the-world plot reasonable and believable. The standard problem with such a plot is the ridiculous implausibility of a computer, even a very highly advanced one, being able to "think" to the extent of independently deciding to do such a thing. [Slight spoiler warning, not crucial to the climax of the book...] Caidin hit on the only really viable explanation of such a plot: the computer is trying to take over the world because that is the most reliable way to carry out its perfectly legitimate orders. Among various other jobs it is doing, it is working on a top-priority request to solve the problem of avoiding nuclear war. Note an important distinction, which the people giving the orders didn't see: not "discover and print a solution", but "solve the problem"! By perfectly straightforward reasoning, it concludes that the method most likely to work is to eliminate human control of nuclear weapons. And a seemingly-innocuous biophysics experiment, being conducted with the computer's help, leads it to the discovery of a way of doing this. So it does its best to carry out its orders... Not a great book, nor even a tremendously good one. Worth reading someday when there's nothing better on hand, though. Henry Spencer U of Toronto