S.U.S.I.E. the supercomputer Kronos is a really nice space invasion flick from 1957. There’s not a lot to it, but it’s a fun film. It plays into the 1950’s fears of invasion and also riffs on the body snatcher fears of the period. In the film there's a supercomputer named S.U.S.I.E.
HAL 9000 The idea of sentient supercomputers has been around for a very long time. In both literature and film we have anthropomorphized them and treated them as thinking, feeling …well…people. A few of my favorites (and by no means anywhere near an exhaustive list) have been from 1909 - The Machine in E.M. Foster’s short story “The Machine Stops” (click HERE to read it) and from Isaac Asimov in 1950 The Machines in the ninth short story from I, Robot titled “The Evitabel Conflict” (Click HERE to read). We got Frost from “For a Breath I Tarry” by Roger Zelazny (click HERE to read it). Form the 1960’s we got HAL from Author C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL is the super computer who causes trouble for Dave. It always amazed me that if you take the letters following each letter of HAL you get IBM. Hmmmm.
In the 70’s we got Proteus IV from Dean Koontz’s Demon Seed. We also got Deep Thought from Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but if we go there we have to include Earth as a supercomputer designed by Deep Thought!
The 80’s brought us “Loki 7281” by Roger Zelazny (click HERE for a youtube video of him reading this humorous story about a personal computer who wants to take over the world). We also got Jane from the Ender’s Game series.
The 80’s brought us “Loki 7281” by Roger Zelazny (click HERE for a youtube video of him reading this humorous story about a personal computer who wants to take over the world). We also got Jane from the Ender’s Game series.
The 90’s we got Blaine the Mono from Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and in the new millennium we have one of my favorites, Archos from the awesome post-apocalyptic novel Robopocalypse. There’s tons of them in film but my two favorites are Mother from Alien and Jarvis from the Iron Man movies.
So why are we talking about supercomputers? Good question. In the film Kronos, there’s a computer that’s pretty much treated as a character in the film called S.U.S.I.E (Synchro Unifying Sinometric Integrating Equitensor). And THAT is what an acronym is. An acrnym is an abbreviation by taking letters of a group of words and stringing them together to make another word. Like SCUBA actually stand for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. RADAR – radio detection and ranging. Some acronyms get used incorrectly like ATM. Many people say ATM machine but that means they are actually saying Automatic Teller Machine Machine.
And that’s really all Kronos has to offer as far as literature is concerned.
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