man plus

i picked up man plus on a whim at the local antique/thrift store. i recognized the author’s name, i like acquiring little objects, and the excerpt & summary seemed interesting. it’s about a secret us government project to create a cyborg who can survive on mars without a spacesuit. the project is pretty far along when the story begins. the cyborg is far enough along to breathe in a tank simulating martian conditions and survive on very little food. this cyborg is not our viewpoint character. our protagonist is one of the people on standby to be the next cyborg if this one dies, third in the monsterfication line of succession. both of the people ahead of him are temporarily indisposed, though, so when the cyborg dies, he’s next on the operating table.

(that sounds like it might be a spoiler, but it’s part of the summary on the dust jacket.)

i haven’t read enough sci-fi of this vintage to generalize, but from what i’ve gathered this seems to be an archetypal instance. the technological extrapolations & lack thereof are fascinating. scientists can wire nerve to motor, sensor, artificial eyes, but audio is still stored on tape. they can run human sense data through a computer and feed it into the brain, but that computer is a massive mainframe. people listen to the radio in their self-driving hovercars.

even more fascinating is the sociopolitical climate. the catholic requirement for clerical celibacy has been relaxed, which is more odd than anything else. there are widespread food riots, new york is a conflict zone, china and japan (and possibly other east asian countries?) have combined into one communist nation. almost every woman we see is a wife or a nurse or a secretary. (the one exception falls head over heels for our protagonist.) if i’m remembering correctly, there are only five characters of color. three of them are on the us team. there’s a psychiatrist who does screenings for the president and is there for less than a page. there’s a nurse who’s nice to the protagonist and who he sexually harasses. and there’s a college student who shows up at the end to deliver plot critical information. remaining are two chinese men who have gone to australia for some scientific/diplomatic thing. the narration jokes about their names, and their personal mission while outside the Repressive Regime of Communist Asia is to get pizza and watch uncensored pornography. one of them dies. they’re plot devices. really racist.

in short, this book is definitely a “white guy writing 70s sci-fi” vision of the future.

it’s pretty interesting stylistically. very fond of telling rather than showing. we’ll meet a character and spend a page or two being told what their deal is — the priest who still holds out hope that he can minister to alien life, the ophthalmologist who plans to parlay his work on the man plus project to private practice — and you’d think this would be sterile or lifeless, but it was surprisingly effective. it reminds me of chrichton a little bit. “somewhere his advertiser’s brain is still writing copy” from jurassic park still sticks with me, and there’s a lot of that sort of thing here.

i can’t really recommend it. even if you can stomach the aforementioned bigotries, it’s one of those books that stops happening more than it ends. it starts strong, building forward momentum, wrangling with Big Ideas in a very sci-fi way… and then once they actually get to mars they go in circles for a bit, drop a big plot twist, and end on a cliffhanger. it’s like eating a roll that’s got a pretty good crust but is soggy and undercooked in the middle, if the roll was also racist & sexist.

eighteen years after man plus was published, the author collaborated with someone on a sequel. there’s a good chance i’ll read it, but that’ll be more out of curiosity than anything else.