The TERMINAL MAN.

The Terminal Man is a novel of breath-taking suspense and alarming implications; its theme – mind control. A thrilling combination of science fact and fantasy, of cool documentation and narrative drama, it is the story of the first operation linking a human brain and a computer.

At University Hospital, Los Angeles, a team of brain surgeons tensely await the arrival of the patient who will help them make history. A mild, middle-aged computer scientist, capable of savage assault while in the grip of epileptic seizures, is the man chosen as the first recipient of a computer brain to control his behaviour. The build-up to the operation, its performance, its unpredictably horrifying outcome, create the mounting tension and terror of the chronicle. A mechanical killer, with a grim mission in mind, is unleashed on the city. Doctors and police begin a desperate race against time before an irreversible mechanism of destruction is set in motion.

Even more compulsive and chillingly plausible than The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man raises questions vital to the immediate future. How far can man safely go in his marriage with the machine? How desirable, or inevitable, is the artificial control of anti-social behaviour? How long before today’s fiction becomes tomorrow’s fact? Rarely, in this decade, can so enthralling a novel have sounded so effective an alarm.