The Four Day Weekend

The Four Day Weekend, George Henry Smith, Belmont Books, 1966

Earth of the early 21st Century has been taken over by the automobile. Cities are full of parking lots for cars, garages to store cars and streets up to 20 lanes wide for cars. Parks and other green spaces in cities are long since gone. Think of it as car worship gone wild.

Charles Hyde, of Los Angeles, is one of the last of the holdouts, those who use mass transit because they are actually afraid of cars. They are built by machine, and are bigger and wider than ever, with actual blades and scythes sticking out everywhere. The newest model, El Toro, has actual horns like a bull on the front bumper. Because of this, auto-related deaths and injuries have skyrocketed over the last few years, with thousands of casualties each weekend.

On the last trip of the city's train system, before it closes due to lack of riders (because everyone is driving a car), Charles meets a man named Enders. He seems like your average crank, talking about how cars are going to wipe out humanity. That is, until the cars, run by electronic brains, really do start killing everyone. The word "slaughter" comes to mind. What makes it worse is that a four day weekend is coming, so everyone will be out and about in their cars. Charles and Enders make it to the harbor, and take a small boat to an island just off the coast. There, a famous cyberneticist has joined a colony of beatniks who refuse to believe that anything is wrong. They are convinced when they see El Toro, who has followed them from Los Angeles, come very close to adding Charles to the casualty list.

They fly to Detroit on a mechanical plane piloted by an ex-military man who is convinced that the Communists are to blame. Their destination is The Great Computer, a supercomputer under the city that has been building the cars for the last 100 years. Needless to say, it is very well guarded. They manage to reach the Inner Sanctum, and find that The Great Computer is controlled by aliens who are simply speeding up what humans are already doing to each other, which is killing each other with their cars. Therefore, what is the problem?

This is a really good novel, that is surprisingly thought-provoking. Think of the number of computer circuit boards in the average car. In the not-too-distant future, all cars will be built by robots. Consider the number of people killed and injured on America's roads (tens of thousands). Read this book (it's very much worth it), then put it all together. Hmmmmm. . .