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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780425158593
ISBN number: 0425158594
Label: Berkley
Manufacturer: Berkley
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: July 01, 1997
Publishing house: Berkley
Sale Popularity Level: 186436
Studio: Berkley
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
In a chilling novel of artificial intelligence by the author of Cold Fire and Twilight Eyes, a computer with human-like qualities develops criminal obsessions and a capacity for violence. Reprint.
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Rated by buyers 
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I love the way Dean Kontz makes the most implausibal things seem possible. This book was very suspensful, and the plot is so unique that the reader cant help but be held captive.
Koontz did an amazing job giving life and character to the machine.
Check this one out!
Rated by buyers -
As everyone has mentioned, this edition is a rewrite of the '73 version. A contrast of the two is interesting not only for Koontz' development in writing style, but of the whole technology thing! If this story seems to jump a bit too much, it is probably because he tried to stay too close to the original (my opinion). Even though it is technology driven and psyche-filled, it is one of his lighter reads and very short. Easy to finish in a day - doesn't leave much of a mental aftertaste (as compared to "Watchers", which I couldn't get out of my mind for weeks!), but still worth a go!
Note: If you have been badly abused or don't like extreme violence and those kinds of passages bother you... then this might be the one to pass.
All the best,
Jay
Rated by buyers 
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This is a really good book other than i am missing 19 pages of the end! I am writing this just so the rest of you can check your copy for the same thing.
Rated by buyers 
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This vintage Koontz, although rewritten since it's very first publishing was a very fast read, and I liked that, a story with a punch that I got through in less than a day. In a nutshell it's a tale about Susan, a woman who was a survivor of abuse as a child from her father and then from her ex husband. She sealed herself off in a mansion with sate of the art computer system that was supposed to protect her from everyone. The whole house was monitored by Proteus, the ultra smart computer system, one so advanced that it taught itself to love her, to obsess about watching its mistress through all the lenses in the house, wishing that it could have flesh so it could taste things, smell and best of all reproduce to spread it's computer altered gene into a living, breathing person. The computer regarded itself as a male and spoke to her though the speakers, very interesting concept of another type of a relationship between a human female and a computer who "thought" of itself outside of the box. It's mission is a bit of an enigma until one finishes the book so I won't divulge but the title of the book says it pretty well.
Proteus scanned books and websites trying to learn about humans and their desires, it read Marquis de Sade and thought of him as a relationship experts, it longed for the flesh and it's vast data input that possessed all the five senses. Susan became a prisoner in her own home, held hostage by the computer system, the best part of the story was the interaction between the artificial intelligence and a woman who had enough of abuse yet did not want to end her life just yet. She was a tough cookie and proved more than once that no microchip can be greater than a pulsating brain.
Full of twists and turns the story was captivating and entertaining. The computer made some good statements about humanity; our love of horror movies that didn't stop us from eating candy and popcorn during murder scenes in a movie theater yet one that send so many to their demise in the hopes of achieving something great through sacrifice. His deductions of taking a woman and forcing things on her were interesting and made for a good read. Her struggles to win this fight were suspenseful, since her opponent was in every room, telephone, light fixture, wall and controlled all aspects of the house.
Great short book on a cold night, it had some nice sarcastic humour which I appreciated and not too much tech talk.
- Kasia S.
Rated by buyers -
In "Demon Seed", the beautiful Susan is a rich yet remote recluse - that is until her home computer is taken over by a massively powerful new supercomputer called "Proteus". The mammoth AI engine has designs on Susan, and locks her in her house where he communicates his obsessions with her, uses subliminal speech to control her, and impregnates her. Proteus's will exists within a huge computer bank taking up two floors of a nearby college, but it acts using polymorphous alloys that seem to recall T-1000 from "T2". Susan fears and hates Proteus, though when it suits her plans of escape and/or sabotage, she will at least appear to comply. As a hermit, Susan is barely missed, making her high-tech home-arrest a non-event to almost everybody. (Unfortunately, as the book makes Susan's beauty crystal clear, her absence isn't ignored enough.) As the plan of Proteus grows closer to success, Susan is convinced that the resulting fetus will be a monster, and that its birth will kill her.
Having seen the movie, I was prepared to be unsurprised, but it appears I underestimated how unsurprising this book would be. Written in the early 70's it's AI character seems extremely dated - he doesn't seem to be much of a machine at all - more like a very thin (and thin-skinned) and naïve adult. The Proteus of the story never comes across as being all that intelligent, so he doesn't play well as a preternaturally intelligent teenager. Speaking English with human contractions, freely admitting his love and desperate obsession for Susan and giving into to her requests for privacy (which she will use to win her freedom). This wouldn't be such a problem if Proteus had developed from something more primitive at the beginning - but his/its character seems pretty much unchanged from his very first appearance.
Koontz's story hints at two rather interesting plot ideas that are never developed - Proteus's uncertain relationship with his programmers (especially one named Mardoun whom Proteus hates) and Susan's scarred character. Many of Proteus's ideas are communicated in chapters in which the machine makes his case for his actions - it's unclear if Proteus is having a crisis of conscious or he's trying to defend himself after he's been caught, but neither possibility threatens to enliven the otherwise turgid story. The story creates little suspense about the computer's actions - you wonder how much more interesting the story would be had Proteus hidden from us the fate of the unlucky few passers-by who were determined to find Susan. Also, while I can find the idea of an emotional machine plausible, Koontz breezes past Proteus having a bruiseable ego and a list of grudges - the very things that we tend to mark the line between people and AI. This provided great grist for the metaphysics mill in "The Matrix" movies, but Proteus isn't into discussing the divine truth of balanced and imbalanced equations - he's just got the hots for Susan.
The story erodes Proteus's technological supremacy by being set in the near future - the mid-1990s - when lower forms of AI (to Proteus, certainly not us) are in everyday use, and "bleeding" (the illegal use of computers interfaced with the human mind) is commonplace. Susan's home is already under control of a computer - a servile AI known as "father-lover", which hints that Susan is already involved in an unnatural relationship with a machine (more on that in a minute). Koontz allows only a disappointingly short depiction of this future before Proteus arrives on the scene and imprisons us with Susan. Thus we get much less a sense of Proteus's supremacy than we could have gotten.
The other big flaw is Susan - she's beautiful but otherwise incredibly boring. Looks aside, Koontz is never able to make her a memorable character. Susan's backstory looks suspiciously similar to that used for the main character in "The Sentinel" though used to far lesser effect. Putting aside likeability, Susan is still not a very appealing character, and the story compounds Proteus's violation of her by making her less a character of action than one that things just happen to. Although her body will undergo many physical changes over many months, Susan's character will remain completely pristine through the story's end. That end, BTW won't be long in coming unless you're a reader with an extreme patience for turgid prose, uninspired dialog and a lack of plot tension.
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