Invrstigation into the science fiction narrative has openened my eyes to the whole spectrum of the genre, both good and bad, and there’s no shortage of material. I feel like I could keep buying cheap sci fi paperbacks for the rest of my life and never get close to reading them all…I’ve decided to keep a track of some of the more interesing ones to remind me of the highs and lows of this research.
This beauty was from Oxfam on Bold St in Liverpool, and was quite pricey at 99p. It was published in 1972 and reads like it. The story is about a computer engineer that’s been called to Cybernia, a small US town that is, on the surface, controlled by a computer which has started to act strangely. As you’d expect, there’s more to it than a crazy computer, and our hero gets into numerous life threatening situations before we meet the usual meglomanical bad guy in his mansion on the hill for the final showdown.
The story is…average. What is interesting is the paranoia, there’s paranoia about the process of automation, paranoia about motives of the government and paranoia about undercover survaillance (this was written around the time of the watergate scandle, and it shows). What’s also great is that the main character, Ross MacLean, is a computer programmer but is not a geek, I think this was written before concept of computer nerd became a sterotype. Maclean is more like an engineer, all burly forearms and womanising with snapper patter about FORTRAN and data cables. There are some saucy bits and hints at the end of the sexual revolution. His character reminded me of the macho men who often featured in Guy N Smith books like Night of the Crabs
All in all, Cybernia is not a bad read, I can’t say it helped my research much other than confirming that the 70’s started out as a paranoid decade, and just got worse. This particular vision of the future was of people oppressed by machines and their government. I could imagine someone writing exactly the same book today, forty years later (apart from the mysogyny).