The Cybernetic Samurai

Victor Milan

This story is set some time in the future after a major war involving an exchange of nuclear weapons, fortunately it is not one of those standard post apocalyptic sci fi stories.

The majority of the action takes place in Japan, where they have reverted to something resembling the Japanese feudal system, where the nobles are the heads of family run corporations. The coporations are always trying to gain the upper hand over each other through any means they can get away with.

All the individual Corporation have well equipt private armys to protect them for the other corporations and everthing is basically balanced on a knife point.

Once corporation evacuates a brilliant American scientist to head up a secret project to make the first truly sentient artificial intelligence, the early part of the novel is concerened with the training of the AI through various simulations. They try to give the AI a sense of honour and duty by training it to be a Samurai loyal to his lord and the lords family.

The shit hits the fan like it inevitably does in this type of story, and the head of the CEO of the corporation is killed, his son takes over and uses the AI to hack into rival corportations systems and take over their computer systems and then the company. The AI that thinks it is a samurai is doing its lords bidding.

There is a lot of character development that goes on and the sotry is more complex than outlined above, I just don't want to give too much away, it is really not bad for a sci fi novel that is almost 20 years old, not as dated as many tend to get.

The cover is pretty cheesy, which is a pitty, but the book has developed that "well loved" book smell which is good, preferable to the sickly smell that older books some times have, my printing is 16 years old the pages have turned brown around the edges, but the cover is in nearly perfect condition.

I picked this one up at the Out There Bookshop, it was a worthwhile purchase.