Just Finished Reading: B.E.A.S.T by Charles Eric Maine (FP: 1966) [190pp] 

The warning came from Security at the research facility RU8. The facility director, Dr Charles Gilley, was spending a lot of time and resources on a personal project – and without any authorisation. If there’s one thing that governments anywhere don’t readily approve of its people feeding their ego from the public trough. Seeing it as another ‘boffin’ going off the reservation, the Department assigned Mark Harland to investigate further and shut the unauthorised project down. Posing as a replacement in RU8’s security section Mark finds out there’s more going on than anyone outside the facility even suspected. Dr Gilley has been working on giving his computer system a brain – and he may very well have succeeded beyond his wildest dreams! 

I read this as part of a set of man vs machine science-fiction novels I’ve been picking at over the last year or so. As I’ve read some Maine before I was expecting a reasonable work of SF while taking into account its age. It started off reasonably well with a decent premise – rogue scientist, dangerous project etc. Unfortunately, it very quickly descended into something approaching farce. It did have a surprisingly good idea embedded in the heart of the story though which honestly impressed me – the idea of Artificial Intelligence being produced via evolutionary computing. That’s a VERY modern idea for 1966! Again unfortunately, this excellent idea was completely ruined by both very bad writing and several ridiculous sub-plots including the AI ‘taking over’ the good Dr in order to ‘reproduce’ and the storyline around the very attractive, and very popular, Scandinavian programmer who was ‘involved’ with most of RU8’s scientific staff. It was, needless to say, both incredibly sexist and completely unnecessary. I can only imagine that the author/publishers wanted something ‘spicy’ to attract the young male readership of the ‘Swinging Sixties’. I certainly can’t think of any other good reason for it. Oh, and the ending was truly awful – as if that made any difference at that point. Despite a decent premise and a very good central idea this was, honestly, terrible and I only really finished it because it was so short. Most definitely not recommended.