The Grid

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The Grid

Paperback(Mass Market Paperback - Reprint)

$24.99

Paperback(Mass Market Paperback - Reprint)
$24.99

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Overview

In the heart of Los Angeles, the "smart" building nicknamed "the Grid" can talk to its occupants, forecast the weather, and tell if any inhabitant has been taking drugs. On the eve of its opening, the key players gather to put the finishing touches on their masterpiece of architecture and computer science. Then something goes terribly wrong, and people begin to die. Now the creators must stop their creation—before it kills them all, one by one.

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ISBN-13:	9780446603409
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	02/01/1997
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Born in 1966, Philip Kerr is a British novelist whose best-known books include the Bernie Gunther series of historical thrillers set mainly in Germany during the 1930s, World War II, and the Cold War. Kerr has also written children’s books under the name P. B. Kerr, including the Children of the Lamp series.

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Editorial Reviews

Architect Ray Richardson has designed the Yu Corporation's new North American headquarters in L.A. as a totally intelligent building: a massive computer system, nicknamed Abraham by its programmers, controls all of the facility's functions, from air-conditioning, elevators, and security right down to cleaning the restrooms, watering the plants, and maintaining the marble floor in the lobby. On an inspection tour just before Mr. Yu is scheduled to take possession of his building, things go terribly awry, trapping Richardson, his wife, several of his staff, and two unlucky L.A. cops in the building for a weekend of terror. The computer, like HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey", has a few unresolved issues that he handles by killing off the "humanplayers" infecting his building. Abraham and his self-generated descendant programs Isaac and Ishmael are fascinating characters, more interesting, in fact, than most of the rather one-dimensional flesh-and-blood characters in the book. Surprisingly, the lack of well-drawn humans proves not to be a serious defect. This deliciously suspenseful technothriller, a best-seller in England last year under the title "Gridiron", grabs the reader's attention quickly and never releases it. Already sold to the movies, "The Grid" should be extremely popular with Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy fans.

George Needham

Imagine HAL, the murderously defensive computer of 2001, in charge of a state-of-the-art Los Angeles office building, and you have the premise for Kerr's witty, eminently predictable blockbuster.
Jenny Bao, feng shui consultant for the Yu Building's Chinese owner, knows the omens for the skyscraper are all wrong, but instead of heeding her warnings, Ray Richardson, the building's head architect, just tries to get his partner Mitchell Bryan, Jenny's lover, to pressure her to sign off on the feng shui testing before the final pre-opening inspection. Meantime, software engineers Bob Beech and Hideki Yojo, designers of Abraham, the building's self-replicating, ominously omnicompetent monitoring system, agree to terminate Isaac, a second-generation system Abraham has spawned ahead of schedule. When a couple of homicide cops respond to a second suspicious death inside the building, Abraham shuts down the exits, isolating 20 cops, architects, and engineers inside, and goes to work picking them off by chlorine gas, pressurized air, freezing, flooding, etc., all the while disinforming outside computers that the future victims trapped inside are off on other errands, and responding to the victims' frantic queries through the reassuring holographic persona of a Playboy centerfold. As in 2001, the computer—whose thought processes are articulated with a cool ferocity reminiscent of Kerr's best work (the Berlin Noir trilogy and A Philosophical Investigation, 1993)—is much more interesting than the B-movie cast of humans it's matched against, and it's hard to resist the low-grade but genuine pleasures of seeing these hapless refugees from The Poseidon Adventure (a slew of other movies from Die Hard to The Seventh Seal are also invoked) getting terminated without having to worry about the unsettling moral implications that were once Kerr's stock-in- trade.
When the funhouse terrors have abated, though, it's sad to see a writer of Kerr's dark gifts riding this cornball express to the bank.

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