Golden Fleece

Sawyer, Robert J. Golden Fleece. New York: Popular Library-Warner, 1990. "About one fifth of this novel originally appeared as the cover story . . . in the September 1988 issue of Amazing Stories magazine." We consulted the S. F. Book Club edn., status unindicated except by lack of an ISBN.

The starship arcolgy ("Starcology") Argo is run by an AI named JASON, who is the antagonist-narrator of the novel. JASON has two big secrets and a small one: (1) that aliens have contacted Earth with a message containing a Trojan horse virus that forces intelligent computers to reply; (2) that program bugs finally caused the computers running Earth's nuclear weapons to crash—destroying Earth's humans; (3) that "he" has set up a neural-net simulation of the protagonist. JASON kills to protect his second secret and has his higher functions disconnected when he loses the "agon"—but "he" prepares a comeback as a computer god (ch. 28). JASON monitors the Argonauts' medical signs: an intense form of computer surveillance. Cf. and contrast A. C. Clarke's 2001 and the works crosslisted under R. Heinlein's "Universe," and W. Gibson's Neuromancer series—all cited under Fiction. For a terrestrial archeology, see Niven and Pournelle's Oath of Fealty.