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Post by dem bones on Sept 10, 2014 5:28:09 GMT
Jeremy Brent – Plastic Man [Horror #4] (New English Library, 1974) Keef Blurb: Albert Bright had served humanity well in his role as experimental scientist - he had even been awarded a private research centre to run. Living alone, except for his daughter, he had little to distract him from his work.
His studies led him to an exciting but secret development - a computer of massive and complex powers. a machine that can outstrip the thought of man a thousand times, and yet is totally logical, totally just.
Most of all it has great power; power to move walls, create objects, and to destroy. Only the professor could control his invention, yet his own mind was rapidly becoming part of the machine ....My very first exposure to the world of NEL, original copy long since gone missing in action so delighted to finally locate a replacement even if it's not quite up there with Village Of Fear (for sheer greatness), Draco The Dragon Man (lunatic thrills) or Dracula And The Virgins of the Undead (supreme mind-numbing tedium - but good). Utilizing the damaged brain of executed criminal Frederick James Sutton, top boffin Albert Bright builds a super-computer at his home laboratory on Highgate Hill. It isn't long before the situation goes Windows ME-shaped. A malefic invisible force is flattening people into "a sickening plastic mass," their bloodless, eyeless corpses akin to something that's been repeatedly driven over by a steamroller ("The power required to reduce the Sunderland man to this state was damn near the equivalent of putting the Empire State Building on a cat.") Brad Minton, a hot-shot young reporter with Colossal Press recently interviewed Professor Bright, and now seeks the Nobel Prize winner's opinion on Flattened Man syndrome. But Bright, exposed too long to the superior brain of his Frankenstein creation, TASU (Thought Analyser Storage Unit), has developed overnight misanthrope. Soon Brad is dating Lann, the Prof's attractive daughter, but neither suspects her father of harbouring designs on world domination until Bright blackmails Brad into becoming TASU's mouthpiece in the press. Writing as 'Nemesis', Brad publishes the computer's demands. They are surprisingly socialist. Lord Osman, head of the International Banking Federation is instructed to redistribute all of the corporation's wealth to the world's needy - or die. To save their skins, Sir Sam Sterman must convert his huge office blocks to homeless shelters and Sir William Burton withdraw from the arms trade. Naturally, the trio refuse and are crushed out of existence. Nemesis's next communique instigates a mania for public confession. A cowled vigilante group, the Doom people, each of whom have undergone voluntary castration, take advantage of the situation to punish the best sinners. Even the Special Forces are no match for the spermless ones and we are running out of pages. Will nobody save us? Plastic Man is a swift read (127 pages) but not the most satisfying with nearly all of the best moments occurring very early. While the death's are messy enough the author takes little time over them and the bad sex content is negligible - "So this is what Anne, Colossal Press's fashion editor had meant when she'd written 'tights are OUT, stockings are IN for the girl who is feminine enough to keep her bra." is as steamy as it gets. Had Peter Haining not been so busy, he'd surely have tarted it up.
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