Classic SciFi(?) dystopia, with two AIs.

Hi,

I'm searching for a book I've read during the mid-90th in German. But I think the book was older, maybe classic Scifi and was translated from English.

What I remember from the plot:

It starts with a common man who just lived his life but the life has started to fall into pieces. He has two children with his wife, but as requested the children are genetically enhanced and have extreme high IQs. They have left their parents willingly for a special school, and they were even before not much child-like.

This drove his wive into insanity (or into alcoholism/drugs). On his way home he find a body near their apartment and he fears to get convicted for the murder, cause he is the first one who is seen by the body.

Later his wife is executed for the murder, without a trial. She is put to death in a public arena with a laser. (But I think his husband didn't know this. He isn't informed. To him she just has disappeared.)

With his life torn apart, he starts running and on some day he even runs outside the city.

-- The whole population lives in cities and most are depend on a social allowance of kind of nutrition bars from a local food bank .. that are sometime - whoops - poisonous. Being outside of a city is counted as suspicious behaviour. Everything is controled by a big AI. --

He encounters kind of a resistance to the government outside the city and he joins them, eventually. In German the resistance is called "Renegaten" so maybe the original term is "renegades".

The resistance owns a big AI, too and during the endgame their AI fights the government AI. I remember the scene in which the renegade AI bids farewell to the main protagonist.

I can't remember how the book ended but I think the renegade AI 'died'.

Any ideas?


Greetings,

Mela

Do you recall any specific names or unique terms in the story aside from "Renegaten"? Those details can help a lot in a Google search.

Yes "Autodafé". But I'm searching Google at least once a year up and down, hoping to find the book as more content is getting digitized. Until today, without any luck.

Greetings,

Mela

Roger Zelazny had a short story entitled 'Auto de Fe'.

Could it be an Asimov 'Hari Seldon' tale? He was a detective (of sorts) on Earth where everyone lives inside arcologies that are more like hives. The general population are terrified of going outside as there are some dangerous weather extremes (why the arcologies were constructed in the first place).

There is a Gordon R. Dickson novel where the main character's mother is taken away and his father goes to bits. I don't think the mother is executed for murder. That was 'The Way of the Pilgrim', an excellent tale.

A character or place name would be very useful in identifying it.

.

If you're still out there and still looking, might I suggest you try posting this over at scifi.stackexchange.com? They have a pretty good hit rate on story ID questions, too.

Another possible resource is ISFDB. Here, for example, is a list of German-language anthologies published in the 1990s (at least the ones in the database):

Advanced Title Search

I remember a long ago book... but I do not think it started out with a family atmosphere. There were a huge AI that controlled the city and controlled the humans. One guy escaped or accidentally fell out of the city and resulted in his capture with a explosive collar around neck. He somehow escapes again and joins the resistance. The only way to get the explosive collar off his neck was to... remove his head The resistance also had their own AI, a copy of the city AI. When created years ago, the AI knew human servitude was bad so created a copy of itself to create a challenge.
Unsure of the name or author but I read it back in the late 80's.
-eric