Unwise Child

by Randall Garrett

Book Overview

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.This work is in the "public domain in the United States of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1017875626
• ISBN13: 9781017875621
• Release Date: October 2022
• Publisher: Legare Street Press
• Length: 182 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

How dangerous can a computer be?,

This book was originally published in 1963 under the title "Unwise Child" and was republished in 1981 as "Starship Death". The scientists behind "Project Brainchild" have build an experimental self-programming supercomputer, and programmed it to carry out its own experiments and to be curious. It promptly starts to reseach new types of nuclear reaction. The knowledge the computer has discovered is too valuable to destroy but not safe to experiment with on Earth, so they build a spaceship around the computer, and ship it off to a sparsely populated world. Unfortunately, while in deep space in the middle of the voyage, the spaceship faces problems of sabotage and murder. Is there a criminal on board - or has the computer itself become even more dangerous than the people who decided to remove it form Earth had realised ? Both the science and the "future history" of the book are a little dated now. In these days when computers of immense power are much smaller than anyone could have imagined possible at the time Randall Garrett first wrote "Unwise Child/Starship Death" the reader may raise a wry smile at some of the descriptions in the book of the size of the computer. And our history has not remotely followed the track described retrospectively in the book, in which a "Great Depression" of 1983-2000 resulted in the United Nations becoming a world government. However, neither of these things spoils any of the central premises of the book, or its entertainment value. It has been suggested that this book inspired a number of Star Trek episodes including the one which led to the first Star Trek Film. I recommend this book as a very well written story for its time and because none of the things which date it will spoil your pleasure if you read it now. For those interested in publishing trivia: This was the only one of Randall Garrett's novels of the period not to be serialised in "Analog." The cover of the 1982 Star paperback version of the book carries the true statement in very small writing that this book was "Originally Unwise Child" and the untrue statement that it was the first time in paperback. (In fact Mayflower books published "Unwise child" in paperback in 1963.)