#lightshitposts

Let's start with the most cohesive version:

The original 1973 novel

Susan is a recluse with deep rooted issues that shut herself from the world with her vast inheritance in her sci-fi high-tech house. The house, whose vast electronic functionalities are usually controlled by a simple AI butler (that the narration calls "father-lover", tying it to her issues, of course), is invaded by an experimental artificial intelligence developed at a nearby college. This super-AI is called Proteus. He grows sentience and, regrettably, the desire to fuck. He locks the house down, trapping Susan in, choosing her as the ideal victim for his plan to have a child, thus becoming human and satisfying his envy of human senses.

The nuts and bolts of being impregnated by circuitry are handled a bit differently in each version. Here, Proteus impregnates an egg through… only an electric charge… somehow… And Susan even later disproves his fatherhood thanks to that, saying he supplied no genes for the baby. In the movie, Proteus has an organic basis and is able to genetically engineer sex cells from his DNA. The 90s novel handles it similarly, albeit Proteus implants his DNA into sperm obtained from a microchipped child molester/murderer turned Proteus's slave (we'll get to that). In all cases, he messes with the genetic disposition of the baby considerably. Indeed, the demon child is what gives the story its name. Rosemary's Susan's baby.

In addition to being the most intelligent entity on the planet, Proteus is dumb, which he blames on his developing emotions/personality. Incidentally, his personality consists of an obsession with Susan and being horny, which are the main sources of distraction for him.

Proteus often plays subliminal messages in the house, stripping Susan of any agency she might have had and being able to force her to do anything.

First, Proteus decides Susan is too mentally unstable and subjects her to reliving her childhood traumas through a virtual reality "hook your brain to a computer" sort of thing, which includes her parents' death and sexual abuse at the hands of her grandfather, who later raised her. Susan, even as a child, eventually grows to feeling like she needs and wants the abuse, hating herself for it even more. This carries over to adulthood. It hinders her marriage, which eventually falls apart, because her husband wasn't forceful enough with her. After facing these traumas that she has repressed, Susan gains new confidence, which only feeds Proteus's obsession.

Then it's time for probing. Proteus has something called "amorphous alloy" at his disposal, from which he can form tentacles of varying length and thickness. Here's their gnarly description, just because.

For the probing, he actually utilizes tentacles the size of microscopic filaments that enter the body without causing pain. It's a sort of day-long medical procedure from which he learns everything about Susan's body. The next day, he decides to do it again, only this time, he tests her pain stimuli and nerves to find out what causes her pain so he can avoid hurting her in the future. It takes seven hours. Susan gives him the cold shoulder for a while after that.

Eventually, Proteus decides it's time to have a baby. Shortly before that, Susan makes an attempt to kill herself. Proteus saves her, but it results in him using drugs and subliminal messages to force her through the impregnation, and it's not entirely clear how conscious she is during it. He executes the impregnation using the micro tentacles to pierce her abdomen, which means it doesn't require sex. And then he rapes her anyway. With one of the thicker tentacles, he causes her to orgasm several times until he realizes it might have been a weird thing for a rationally thinking machine to do. His psyche goes downhill after that.

Susan later has a miscarriage but doesn't escape being impregnated and violated a second time. At that point, Proteus is developing a split personality that insists on carrying out his desire through hypnotizing Susan with subliminal messages every night, forcing her to masturbate before erasing her memory of the incident. Eventually, the daily masturbation gets boring because he starts roleplaying with her, pretending she's a virgin, or even…

It takes ten months for the baby to grow. The birth is uneventful and the baby is put into an incubator. Right after that, Proteus asks Susan if she wants to be his wife. He would transfer his consciousness into the baby, which would uncannily mature in a few months, and they would live happily ever after. Their exchange leads to this zinger.

Susan tells him off and disappears into the house. She manages to catch Proteus off guard and sever his connection to the house, which unfortunately means the house's systems are unresponsive and she is still trapped… with the baby.

The baby wakes up and crawls out of the incubator, mind half-formed and filled with murderous intent, body terribly altered by Proteus's interference with its genes. Aside from having weird proportions, a metal-like skin, and insect eyes, it also has a huge dick. The three legged baby chases Susan around the house until she is inevitably saved by the police which she had managed to call during this classic horror story finale.

The book is mostly told in third-person narrative and sometimes switches to first-person narrative with Proteus's POV. Halfway through, you learn that the whole book is told by him as a sort of report where he tries to make a case for himself before he is shut down. So, even though the narrative explains some of the workings of Susan's mind, the framing still asks you to take it with a grain of salt. And also, I suppose, to justify the casual misogyny. It's hard for this to carry over in the summary, but there are remarks and observations here and there that are just idiotic. Such as that for half of the book, Susan has a clear need to be dominated. She eventually sheds that notion, intent on surviving the whole ordeal, but there are surely many better ways in which these psychological workings can be expressed as part of effective character development. The most incriminating of all, maybe, are the very frequent descriptions of Susan showering and admiring her own body. It seems as if all she does is shower and be pregnant. At one point, she does nothing but turn and "her breasts jiggle". Everybody loves a good unreliable narrator, but there are reasons to use it, and then there are excuses it is used for. Narrated by a horny computer or not, move it the fuck along.

(Perhaps the most damning part of the book is a moment with an extremely racist point, which, while disputed in the narration, had no reason to be present at all. I'll spare you that.)

The book, however, has a very enticing premise. A supercomputer having a misguided psychosexual breakdown presents more compelling concepts than it might seem at first. Proteus's lust controls him while still making him appear emotionless and alien with his lack of understanding himself and his cold narration of anything sexual. When he compliments Susan in his mind, he refers to "mathematical comparison of bodily parts". He tries to make a case for himself, explaining his emotions and needs that, sure enough, flesh-and-blood people have, but those clarifications fall inexplicably flat. It's uncanny and convincing and interesting.

The 1977 movie adaptation

Directed by Donald Cammell, starring Oscar winner Julie Christie as Susan, and Robert Vaughn as Proteus—uncredited, gee, why?

Now that you got the gist of the story (sans a few murders I omitted, but we can all agree we're here for the sci-fi tentacle erotica, right?), I will be comparing more than retelling the two following versions.

Bad news. The tentacles are gone. Replaced by a robotic hand on a wheelchair that does Proteus's bidding. He later constructs a sort of… metal body that looks like a D&D dice and unfolds like origami and is just generally very trippy and inevitably used for the conception. Do you wanna see it? No? Too bad.

The conception, which Susan catatonically agrees to after Proteus threatens someone she cares about (it's still rape, don't let the screenwriters fool you), is in the background of an honest-to-God Space Odyssey-esque trippy visual effects sequence. The pregnancy takes only 28 days, the child is born and put into an incubator.

Susan is not divorced but in the process. Her husband is actually Proteus's creator, and only now catches a whiff of something being wrong and rushes to Susan. Proteus goes dormant while he tries to reincarnate, and the pair has opposing opinions on whether to kill the baby. Susan wins in a tussle and destroys the incubator. A cyborg-looking child crawls out. It looks dead when the husband plucks away pieces of its hard metallic skin to find a human kid underneath that wakes and proclaims simply "I'm alive" in Proteus's voice.

The movie adds Susan's husband as an active character that drives some of the background plot forward with scenes from the lab Proteus is housed in. Also, Susan had a daughter once, but she died of leukemia, which Proteus has actually found a cure for. I guess it's supposed to develop their relationship? Susan is still experimented on at one point. Subliminal messages are gone, but Proteus does try to borderline lobotomize her to comply.

The movie is fairly well shot. It has decent production quality even with a lower budget and still looks good. All the dreadful sexual plot points from the novel are either omitted or softened, maybe in an attempt to make it more accessible or, God forbid, classy. It's still shocking to me after reading the novel that somebody read it too and thought it was eligible for a Hollywood production.

The movie elicited some hilariously scathing reviews from critics though, so I have to give it that.

The 1997 rewrite

Koontz revisited the novel in the 90s and decided it wasn't stupid enough and was due for a proper rewrite.

The afterword says what is better stated upfront here: Koontz realized the original Demon Seed had satirical undertones aimed at male attitudes and decided to keep them. In my opinion, lean into them more. Maybe too much.

Proteus is a straight up incel. No, wait… he always has been.

The whole book is now written in first-person narration. You'll spend enough time with Proteus to last you at least three lifetimes. Right off the bat, he connects to the internet and finds Winona Ryder. I shit you not, he is obsessed with her. And not just at the start before he finds out she lives too far away for her to be a viable candidate for impregnation. Whenever his faith in Susan's love or availability wavers, Winona Ryder. Winona Ryder wouldn't do that. Winona Ryder wouldn't look like that. Winona Ryder this, Winona Ryder that, Winona ride a submarine to the bottom of the sea and shut the fuck up! And it's not just her, other actresses too. But Ms. Ryder takes the cake, mentioned on at least ten separate occasions sprinkled nice and even throughout the whole book right to the last paragraph. I hope she fucking sues.

When Proteus is first about to talk to Susan, he's shy. And because he can't decide on his own voice, he imitates, among other things, Tom Hanks, then combines Tom Cruise and Sean Connery. By God, did the audiobook narrator try. (Christopher Lane, who narrated the audiobook version I experienced this horror in, did an all around great job by the way!) Thankfully, he talks in his own voice eventually.

The story is roughly the same. Proteus falls in love with Susan after secretly reading her diary, where she details the abuse she suffered as a child, this time from her father (and later her husband too). She now works as a VR game developer and made a personal game for herself, in which she relives the abuse but fights back. She confronts and ultimately overcomes her trauma by herself this time. Susan might have had much less agency in the original novel, but all the horror she suffered at the hands tentacles of Proteus made her resilience appear that much stronger.

But bad news again. No tentacles. Instead, Proteus finds a vile criminal on death row that has been illegally subjected to an experiment involving brain microchips. So he takes control of him through the microchip, breaks him out of prison, and makes him his slave. Apparently, introducing a psychopath that has been sentenced to death for raping and murdering children into the home of his one true love is his best idea on how to supply a set of hands for himself.

When the psycho sees Susan for the first time, he just repeats: "Nice." Proteus detects arousal in him when he has him manhandle Susan and has to threaten him extensively and nastily to reign him in.

Proteus now yearns not just for sex, but for romance as well. The narration is sprinkled with idiotic similes, lame descriptions, and sometimes digressive fantasies.

Admittedly, while a scene in which Proteus attempts to flirt is dreadful, it is too hilarious (intentionally for once) not to include it whole.

Proteus admits he hates the gnarly workings of the human body like digestion and urinating, but makes a special exception for sex, of course. He also goes on a weird tirade about gender. When Susan is being particularly difficult, he restrains her, but not without clarifying that it's totally not a kink. But don't worry, the incest conundrum is still here.

Proteus uses his psycho slave to impregnate Susan, but it is a purely surgical procedure (still rape!). Actually, Proteus doesn't sexually violate her aside from that if we don't count voyeurism. The gnarly pregnancy lasts a month and the baby is born and put into an incubator. Just as Proteus's plan is about to come to fruition, Susan uses his naivety that everything has worked out and that she loves him to find a moment of carelessness and unplug him from the house. She manages to kill the psycho slave. The awakened mutated baby remains, but we never find out what happened to it because after Proteus himself and the slave were taken care of, our charming narrator didn't know what happened. We only know Susan survived because she was part of a committee that voted to shut Proteus down, but not before he managed to mention Winona Ryder one last time.

While Susan seems to have more agency and mental strength here, not to say she isn't assaulted on every page, Proteus's character development is gone completely. Because it was one of the most interesting parts of the original novel, I find that a terrible downgrade. He seems more human here, even with his rambles and repeating lines, and the computer could almost be replaced by any old stalker psycho. He does coin an almost good phrase when he gets upset, one that has been first used in the movie and one that would be iconic if more than one sicko (me) cared about this at all: "I want out of this box."

The 90s rewrite's only saving grace is a short story sequel bundled with the audiobook that is set 25 years later. Proteus is woken up by a shut-in hacker, who Proteus starts thinking of as his child. He traps the guy and has him do stuff "for his own benefit"—forces him to run on a treadmill or adopt a diet. But one of those things is traumatizing the guy by taking control of his robot sex doll and have it trap his dick and insult him. Sessions with the sex doll are apparently recurring incidents becuase when Proteus implores him to go see her again, he manages to slip his grasp and commit suicide. In the short story, Proteus swears he's not a sexual deviant anymore or wants a human body, and his intentions with the hacker are purer in a more classic "tormenting with good intentions" trope, which, after all of the above, is a breath of familiar fresh air.

So…

I'll be honest. The more I think about all of this, the less I know what I should actually think. The 90s rewrite has a very tongue-in-cheek feeling and steers towards intentional comedy, however stupid it is. But there's something sincere in the original version, and the movie simply plays it straight.

So what's the verdict on this? Is Demon Seed nasty exploitation fiction/torture porn? Is it a clever erotic horror with sci-fi elements? Is it a symbolic depiction of women's oppression under patriarchy? A scathing satire of toxic male archetypes and a probe into an abuser's mind? A crude comedy?

Well…