Computerworld (Daw UE1879)

Computerworld. 1984 was projected by Orwell to be the year of Big Brother and the time of Newspeak. But 1984 is at hand and Big Brother has assumed a different and more real form. Newspeak has been replaced by the new language of the programmers and computer microchips, and the prospects of the years to come now have a more sharply defined and less human form. van Vogt, master of the innovative science fiction, has brought this vision of the days to come into focus with his new novel, the story of our world under the cold and emotionless eye of the almighty computers in conflict with the efforts of just flesh-and-blood people to achieve some way of asserting free will beyond the scope of mechanical programming. The computer controlled them all. Bio-magnetic recognition was infallible, instant. Its eyes were everywhere -- in the street, in the home. There was no escape as it scanned, recorded, knew. An armed Computer Maintenance Corps handled social control. The military-style personnel thought the computer was God. But the computer stole. Energy. With every personal scan, even casual recognition check there went a small but significant subject-to-computer mental energy transfer. Only the Computer Rebel Society saw the threat and had the will to organise against it. The computer, of course, made them outlaws.