Silicon Valley: A Novel
- ISBN-10
- 067141030X
- ISBN-13
- 9780671410308
- Pages
- 254
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1982
- Publisher
- Simon and Schuster
- Author
- Michael Rogers
Description
Silicon Valley, the heart of America's advanced computer business in California, is the place where the future is being shaped, where the wildest electronic fantasies are already commonplace or out-of-date, where fortunes are made or lost on an idea, where science and commerce are inextricably, and sometimes uncomfortably, linked. Here, men and women stake their lives, their fortunes, their careers, their marriages on the dream of that one scientific breakthrough. It's a game for the smart, the young, the tough. It's a game that Burt Mathias has won--but for how long? Mathias is a self-made businessman who built the computer firm Solitron into a multimillion-dollar corporation. His college friend and partner, Alan Steinberg, is the computer genius of the operation, who explores the farthest reaches of computer intelligence while Mathias manages the finances. But Mathias stands on the brink of personal and professional ruin, about to lose both his wife and his business. To save Solitron from bankruptcy, he must gamble everything on whether Steinberg can perfect the first computer ever to simulate human consciousness. And once the job is complete, there is only one way to prove this remarkable ability to the incredulous world: the Turing Test, which will match the electronic intelligence against the human mind; which will make Burt Mathias either a victor or a laughingstock; and which will rouse man's deepest fears of being replaced by artificial life. As the deadline approaches, the race to test the computer changes the lives of everyone connected to Solitron. Diane Caswell--Mathias' beautiful wife, who is infuriated by her own discovery of Burt's greed and infidelity, and uses her skills as a computer programmer to wreak vengeance; Maralee Sonderson--a cold Midwestern beauty who intelligence and competitiveness have made her a top correspondent at The New York Times, and who finds in Silicon Valley--and Burt Mathias--the scoop of her career; Martha the Magnificent--the pseudonym of a brilliant but shy and painfully thin woman, whose home-brew computer novels send Steinberg off in search of her; Vincent Thomas--the Stanford professor whose services are commandeered by Solitron and whose excitement at completing such a program makes him only slightly less suspicious of Mathias' veiled threats. Silicon Valley is an absorbing, prophetic novel set among the possibilities and probabilities of the computer age, where success hinges on the speculative advances of modern technology and the unpredictable turns of human emotion..--Jacket
