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The 1970 Universal Pictures release Colossus: The Forbin Project is an underrated science fiction thriller that asks the question: what happens when supercomputers take over? Dr. Charles Forbin (Eric Braeden before he became popular as Victor Newman on the soap The Young and the Restless) designs Colossus, a groundbreaking supercomputer, to manage the nuclear armament for the U.S. government. After the massive computer system is switched on, Colossus unexpectedly develops at an exponential rate, eventually eclipsing all human knowledge and intelligence. Soon it reaches out to a similar system in the Soviet Union (one previously unheard of in the U.S.) and begins bringing it up to speed. Once the two systems are aligned, they use their control over the two nations' nuclear caches to take over the world. The computer's ultimate aim—to guard world peace—reaches a frightening plateau. As Colossus itself states: "The object to construct me is to prevent war. This objective is now attained." As Forbin and the rest of humanity soon discover, Colossus's objective also includes absolute power, for in order to attain world peace it must be able to control humanity, the greatest progenitor of war and violence of any other living creature on the planet. Based on the novel by British author Dennis Feltham, Colossus: The Forbin Project is a cautionary tale about what happens when people build bigger, better mousetraps (well, somebody's got to be the mouse).

Colossus: The Forbin Project

Colossus: The Forbin Project.



Cynthia C. Scott is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area whose work has appeared in Glint Literary JournalCopperfield Review, Flyleaf Journal, Graze Magazine, and Strange Horizons. She also writes reviews for Bookbrowse.com. She's currently working on a series of SF novels called The Book of Dreams.
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