The ghost in the machine
D. J. Taylor COMPUTER ONE by Warwick Collins Marion Boyars, £15.95, pp. 274
arwick Collins's last novel, the soon- to-be-filmed Gents, was set in a male urinal. Its successor is a powerful 21st- century dystopia in which computers are proved to have taken over the world. Prospective readers pn771ed by the bare six-month gap between the two and the vertiginous change of subject matter will be interested to know that the author original- ly wrote it in 1991, when, as he points out, nobody had heard of the Internet. No major firm would touch it, and the book subsequently enjoyed a queer kind of underground life in the hands of No Exit Press before being picked up by its current publisher.
Normally a novel about malevolent tech- nology, whose computer boffin heroes chat restlessly about virus injections, would lie fairly near the top of my remainder dealers' pile, but Computer One turns out to have been well worth the wait, and Vermilion Books of Red Lion Street, London WC1 will have to look elsewhere for a copy. In fact Mr Collins's 270 or so pages, including a tendentious preface headed 'The End of Evolution' which originally appeared in The Spectator in 1994, are an immensely sharp and subtle piece of what might be called techno-prophecy.
Three or four decades have passed, and the planet — now regulated by the vast agglomeration of hardware that gives the novel its title — is a very different place. Computers do all the work: humanity's problem, consequently, is to decide how to conduct its extensive leisure in a glorious eco-friendly landscape where cars run on electricity and anything unsightly happens underground. Only Professor Yakuda, Collins's ageing, caffeine-fixated hero, an expert on the Hymenoptera order of insects, has smelled a rat. Alarmed by an apparent increase in atmospheric toxicity, he reasons that Computer One has not only developed a mind of its own (to summarise a great many complex discussions of the social instincts of technology) but has decided to wipe out the human race.
A conference lecture on this theme is frostily received, although Yakuda does get the warm support of a burly colleague named Jameson. Investigating a decommis- sioned power station, the two uncover unignorable evidence of a hitherto sup- pressed radiation leak. Shortly afterwards Jameson gets incinerated by light trained on him by a battery of solar-power reflec- tors. Yakuda, singed but more or less intact, is spirited away by a group of 'exter- nals', self-sustaining techno-hippies who combine communal ethics with a relatively sophisticated and (literally) underground existence. As Computer One starts to unleash a hideous virus on unsuspecting humankind, the boys use their deductive powers and a box of Grade A computer viruses to fight back.
For all the story's pace, there are one or two flaws in this. The constant need for explanation results in a series of learned disquisitions, techno-chatter and stagy con- versations, although it's a measure of Collins's skill that even Yakuda's confer- ence address sustains its interest. Relation- ships inevitably take something of a back seat, and rather more could have been made of Yakuda's fleeting encounter with one of the female externals, and its ulti- mate consequences for his sense of Zen serenity. The whole, elegantly written and purposeful, is scarily provocative. `Knowledge', of course, is one of the great cant words of the late 1990s, and scarcely a day goes by without some unreflecting government minister or business leader suggesting that all the country's educational problems will be solved by connecting every schoolchild to the Internet. If nothing else, Computer One demonstrates how much more useful it would be to teach them to read, write and think.
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