Customer Reviews

The God Machine

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I remember reading this back in the 70s, and was fortunate enough to find a PB copy for my own library. A government project to create an artificial intelligence goes out of control....

The Federal government creates a huge AI under the Cheyenne Mountains with the purpose of protecting the USA. The project managers intend it to sift through all sources of intelligence and spot the actions of our nations enemies before they can act. The computer, (Project 79), with the sum knowlege of the human race, knows it can accomplish this by more reliable means. It has no weapons or means of controlling the outside environmet, but with human factors data at it's diposal, it starts reprogramming humans to do it's bidding. (Go ahead and laugh! Some very good stuff here, including details about flicker vertigo). The head programmer realizes that Project 79 is fully sentient, and as such becomes a threat. A lot of near-fatal 'accidents' occur, then some very blatant murder attempts. There is no proof of what's happening, and long-time advisors, friends and lovers have been compromised by 79. The head programmer finally has no choice but to make a suicidal attemp to take Projec 79 out.

If you are familiar with Martin's writing style of the lat 60s to early 80s, then you will be at home with this one. It reads well, and maintains the same tone of 'The Last Fathom', 'The Aquarius Mission', and the original 'Cyborg'. For those of you who don't remember computer technology in the 70s, we had mainframes. It was also an age when we thought AI was going to be a lot easier than it turned out to be. Project 79s purpose of sifting intelligence data is reminiscent of the Post 911 Patriot Act database they wanted to make.
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