From archive (archive)
Subject: THE CYBERNETIC SAMURAI by Victor Milan
From: ecl@mtgzy.UUCP
Organization: AT&T Information Systems Labs, Holmdel NJ
Date: 26 Jun 86 04:46:21 GMT



		    THE CYBERNETIC SAMURAI by Victor Milan
			  Arbor House, 1985, $15.95.
		      A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper

     Lately, the emphasis is science fiction has been on computers.
Starting with Vernor Vinge's TRUE NAMES and continuing with William Gibson's
NEUROMANCER and the cyberpunk school (or "the Neuromantics," as Norman
Spinrad calls them), authors in the Eighties are turning to computers the
way authors in the late Forties turned to atomic energy.  But most of them
deal with the enhancement of one's existence through the addition of an
electronic alter ego.  Milan goes back to a much older idea, that of the
artificially created being and applies computer technology.  The result is
neither an electronically enhanced human being nor an artificial
intelligence, but an artificial consciousness.

     In THE CYBERNETIC SAMURAI, Japan has become the center of the
techological world, thanks in part to a limited nuclear exchange (of which
we find out very little).  The Japanese, though they still retain feelings
of superiority over other races in general, and over Westerners in
particular, hire Americans as engineers.  Dr. Elizabeth O'Neill is one such
American.  Her theories about how one could create self-aware programs have
placed her in disgrace in the United States, but Yoshimitsu
TeleCommunications thinks they have some validity and hires her to build
Tokugawa.

     O'Neill has grander plans than even Yoshimitsu realizes--she wants to
instill a moral sense into Tokugawa, a personality...in fact, to teach him
the code of bushido and make him the first cybernetic samurai.

     Milan does a good job of portraying the private inter-corporation
battles hidden behind the public corporate alliances which are common in
Japan today.  He does have a major problem however--he doesn't seem to know
the difference between Japan and China.  He speaks of writing Japanese with
Chinese characters and makes references to classic Chinese art and other
aspects of Chinese life in such a way as to imply that the Japanese have
adopted Chinese culture.  This simply isn't true, and it only serves to jar
the reader out of an otherwise well-drawn society.

     Tokugawa himself (herself? no, I don't think so) is as fully developed
as Milan's other characters.  And while O'Neill at first seems drawn along
the lines of Asimov's Susan Calvin, she rapidly emerges as a unique
personality.  Whether or not you think the scenario Milan draws is likely,
his development of an electronic personality is thought-provoking.  The
concept of a machine evolving into sentience and perhaps even humanity is in
many ways the counterpart of the cyberpunk concept of a human taking on
electronic aspects.  While we can identify more with the latter (as many
have pointed out, eyeglasses and hearing aids are the first step toward our
becoming a race of cyborgs), Milan's picture looks at the question of man
versus machine from a new perspective.  In fact, he shows us just how
similar the two concepts are by portraying them as approaches to the same
middle ground from different starting points.  There is a single road
connecting the human being to the machine and each one can progress toward
the opposite end.  Perhaps, somewhere in the middle, they will meet.

     Intelligent machines have been portrayed before, of course, but as
logical machines (a la Asimov's positronic robots--they are totally logical
and show no initiative or personality).  Tokugawa is a person in the broader
sense of the term; he is one of the silicon beings that may one day be
campaigning against the "Carbonists" who believe that only carbon-based life
forms are entitled to rights.  Read this book.


					Evelyn C. Leeper
					ihnp4!mtgzy!ecl
					mtgzy!ecl@topaz.rutgers.edu