"An exciting man-machine war". -- Daily Telegraph

"A prophetic novel". -- Times Literary Supplement

"This novel really scared me. I thought the last word had been said on artificial intelligence, but I was wrong.... Move over, HAL". -- Arthur C. Clarke

On a California campus in the early years of the twenty-first century, Professor Enzo Yakuda is on the verge of retirement. Although he is a Zen Buddhist, a lifetime's thought and study have led not to inner calm, but to an obsession which begins to haunt him and take over his life. Yakuda believes that he can prove that the self-repair function of Computer One, the international civil computer network which runs just about everything on the planet, will cause an inevitable confrontation with mankind. His nightmare, however, is that in raising the alarm about this hidden danger he will inevitably precipitate the annihilation of the entire human race.

Computer One is both a compelling novel and a terrifying scientific treatise on the near future. Its particular horror lies in the perfectly logical dreamworld of modern scientific theory, its compulsion deriving from a plot which moves like a Greek tragedy towards its chillingly inevitable climax.

This first American edition contains a long, previously unpublished account, written by the author, concerning both the controversial origins and the startling nature of this explosive novel.