Warm thanks to Paul McGuinness and friends at University of Sussex for inviting me to speak on Demon Seed…
In Technothriller (The MIT Press, 2026), Soraya Murray reveals how popular American films featuring advanced technology—mainly biotech, military, and computational—capture our cultural anxieties, dreams, and convictions about the power and meaning of our innovations.
Along with iconic adaptations from technothriller novels by Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, such as The Hunt for Red October and The Andromeda Strain, Murray considers Westworld, Rollerball, Demon Seed, WarGames, Ex Machina, Tenet, M3GAN, and The Creator, as well as the Terminator and Mission: Impossible franchises. Through these films and others, she traces deeply embedded popular beliefs about technology and innovation—and proposes new interpretations of the troubled, sometimes catastrophic relationships between humans and their inventions.
In this talk, Murray shares her work on Demon Seed (Donald Cammell, 1977), a technothriller based on the 1973 book by Dean R. Koontz, in which a supercomputer intelligence ensnares its innovator’s wife in her smart home and forces her to carry its offspring.
SORAYA MURRAY 