Colossus, by DF Jones, is sort of the reason I have a podcast. I won’t tell the full story here, since I tell it in an upcoming episode in which we cover this book and its film adaptation, Colossus: The Forbin Project. But suffice it to say that I listened to a podcast discussing the movie, and they didn’t also talk about the book!!! The horror!
I first read the book after seeing The Forbin Project listed in a “Greatest SF Movies” video. The story goes something like this:
Murica invents machine intelligence to control its defenses
Things go badly
You’ve heard this story before, right? It’s totally The Terminator. That fits the “A.I. gone bad” mold. As do any number of other titles. But Colossus isn’t Skynet, and isn’t really even evil when you get right down to it. In fact, it was constructed to take human decision-making out of the defense equation. Sound like War Games? And once Colossus is in power, it promises to protect humanity from itself. Sound a bit like “The Evitable Conflict” from I, Robot? (Actually, it sounds a lot more like VIKI from the I, Robot “adaptation” starring Will Smith (we totally covered that on the podcast, BTW).
Of course, the idea of an AI going rogue has been done over and over, as far back as R.U.R (which you might recall I reviewed), but really it goes back even further, to Frankenstein. Man cannot always control what he creates. I find it fascinating to see the various ways authors envision the story unfolding, and I particularly like when they subvert the expectation of “well, the humans will win in the end, of course.” So if you agree with me on that last point, read Colossus (or better yet, watch the movie) and stop there.
I’m not a series completist. I’m very likely to pick up the first book in a series, or maybe read the first two, and then call it quits. I did that with Dune, with A Song of Ice and Fire, and with The Dresden Files (though I’ll probably pick more of those up at some point). But I’d been wanting to check out the rest of the Colossus series, and so when Amazon had Colossus free in the Kindle store (got one for Black Friday 2015), I decide it’d be my first Kindle read. Plus, The Fall of Colossus was $1.
The title of the second book really kinda gives away the game, doesn’t it? So you pretty much go into it knowing that Colossus won’t come out on top in the end. But the story in between is interesting, and it sets up Colossus and the Crab nicely. In Fall, there’s some pretty horrifying stuff about Colossus attempting to understand human emotion by subjecting them to all kinds of insane tests. Interesting, but downright disturbing in places.
I didn’t end up buying the final book, and it’s probably because I wasn’t a huge fan of the second. It was still only $4 in the Kindle store, but I cheaped out and got it from the Kindle Lending Library, which is pretty nifty, actually. I won’t give away any of the plot since it keys so heavily on the second book.
If I had to rank the books, it’d go like this:
- Colossus
- Colossus and the Crab
- The Fall of Colossus
So I’m a bit meh on the series, but definitely enjoyed the first book. The thing I love about reading science fiction from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, is that it’s interesting to see what the authors thought the future would look like. And it’s sometimes hilarious to see what they got just so, so wrong. In this case, DF Jones posits a future with a United States of North America (and U.S. of South America, and U.S. of Europe), but with a U.S.S.R. that endured into the 21st Century. And there’s spectacular transportation technology, but little to no wireless communication beyond radio, and certainly no Internet. Teletype is the order of the day when it comes to communicating Human-to-Colossus. Not even a modem present.
And this is to say nothing of the guesses at social changes. Women are totally liberated and equal in the workplace, but “would you please fetch me some food, sweetheart?” wouldn’t raise an eyebrow.
This is a case in which I think the film adaptation did it better. Pulled it back into the 70s, so teletype was the state of the art, and I feel like the female characters were better served. In fact, the film went to great lengths (at least for the time) to represent diversity in the tech workplace, with black, Asian, and female engineers represented. Kinda cool, actually. The one misstep is in the voice-synthesis created for Colossus. It’s totally 70s and to me, a failure of imagination.
The highlight of the film, for me, is Eric Braeden as the main human (and title-sharing) character of Charles Forbin. There’s just something about the easy way he goes about his acting that I find magnetic. Beginnings of a man crush working here!
So, what’s my point? Well, I enjoyed Colossus quite a bit, but my admiration for the film is such that I’m recommending folks skip the book and just check out the movie. Just understand that you’ll be watching as pre-Star Wars a science fiction as exists out there. It’s every inch a movie of 1970. But I love it.
I’ll get the podcast posted in March and update this post when I do, and you can hear my co-hosts not raving about the movie. Philistines!