SCIENCE FICTION ORIGINS

Film and television
- War Games- Joshua
- Hal 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Based on a novel by Arthur C.
Clarke, 2001 is the kind of film that some people will love, and others will
hate. There are many different interpretations of this movie - many of them
religious - and Kubrick
himself has avoided answering questions just to keep the
confusion going. One of the most famous "movie computers", HAL, plays a major role
in this film, and his interactions with his operator, Dave Bowman, have been
parodied many times. The footage of the moon was created more than a year before
Neil Armstrong landed there - and Kubrick had it exactly right. All that is up for
debate is what it all means...
- Tron- Master Control Program
Literature
- Fredrick Pohl
** Mars Plus
- Alfred Bester
** Computer Connection--A group of immortals, while creating another of their kind, unwit-
tingly also create a man-machine symbiosis that soon threatens the
existence of humankind.
** Golem 100--Eight women in a search for fun and excitement tap the unconscious
id of the megacity, producing a demon of startling power and mis-
chief.
- Algis Budrys
** Michaelmas--An electronic genius disguised as a news-reporter controls the run-
ning of the world with the help of his artificially intelligent
computer.
- Samuel Delany
** Babel 17--The language of an invading civilization is found to be based upon
the concepts of AI computer languages and memes.
- Ian McDonald
** Out on Blue Six--Personal happiness factors are constantly monitored in an attempt to
maintain a constant level of emotional sustainability within a
walled-off mega city. Self-intelligent computers act behind the
scenes as they attempt to calculate whether humanity has regained
the ability to rule itself.
Modern representations
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