The Cybernetic Samurai

Milan's hard-cover debut (he is co-author, with Robert Vardeman, of the paperback War of the Powers trilogy) is an Artificial Intelligence yarn that never emerges from the shadows of such self-aware-machine forerunners as Heinlein's Mike (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), Clarke's Hal 9000, and D.F. Jones' Colossus. Following WW III, a relatively undamaged Japan has become the greatest economic power of the new world. Paranoid lesbian computer-whiz Elizabeth O'Neill creates a self-aware, self-motivated computer intelligence, TOKUGAWA - a development that is soon jealously threatened by lesser industrial zaibatsu and a power-hungry arm of the Japanese government. So, as the power struggle shapes up, O'Neill instructs TOKUGAWA in the Samurai bushido code - in order that when TOKUGAWA is invaded and captured, the machine can fight back and recover its independence. But then, out of misdirected Samurai loyalty, TOKUGAWA is obliged to take vengeance on the guilty and innocent alike. More power struggles ensue; WW IV intervenes (TOKUGAWA capably defends Japan); and finally Japan's new warlords demand that TOKUGAWA help them conquer what remains of the world - so TOKUGAWA blows up itself and the warlords. Despite the hardworking Japanese backdrop, then, there are no new perspectives on machine intelligence here; the narrative, despite dollops of sex and gore, is top-heavy with detail (Milan often holds up a battle to explain how the combatants' weapons work), and the prose is unengagingly pompous: "the stressed-cement clamshell halves of the hangar bay yawned open, ready to gulp down the cargo hanging in the swollen orange belly of the dirigible." Ho-hum. (Kirkus Reviews)