Man Plus
by Frederik Pohl
Summary
The United States is going to Mars, not out of ambition but because the geopolitical situation has deteriorated to the point where a national project is the only thing holding the coalition together, and the computers modelling the future say a colony improves the odds of anyone surviving the decade.
A human being cannot live on the Martian surface. So the programme does not send one. Roger Torraway, astronaut, is rebuilt: his eyes replaced with faceted optical clusters, his lungs and much of his digestive system removed, his skin replaced with a dark synthetic membrane, enormous solar wings grafted to his back to power the machinery, and his nervous system routed through a backpack computer because the raw sensory feed would otherwise drive him insane, as it did the previous candidate.
The novel is the surgery and its cost. Roger's wife is having an affair and he can now see her doing it, since he no longer sleeps and his perception is extraordinary. His colleagues are kind and are also managing an asset. He becomes, piece by piece, something that is happier on Mars than on Earth, which is the programme working exactly as designed.
Then Pohl reveals who has been narrating, and the whole project looks different.
Around two hundred and fifty pages, cold, clinical and genuinely sad.
The surgical detail is unhurried and specific, and the worst passages are the ones where Roger sees his own new face and the people around him work very hard to say nothing.
Best for readers who want body horror handled as an engineering problem, and one of the most convincing accounts in fiction of a man consenting to his own dismantling one piece at a time.
Historical Context & Significance
Man Plus won the 1976 Nebula Award for Best Novel and was a finalist for the Hugo and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.
Two years later Frederik Pohl published Gateway, which won the Hugo, and the two books together represent the strongest stretch of a career that began in the 1930s. He had edited Galaxy and If, worked as a literary agent, and written the satire The Space Merchants with Cyril Kornbluth.
The cyborg here is not a superhero. The whole apparatus, the wings, the faceted eyes, the removed organs, is presented as an ugly and expensive engineering compromise arrived at by committee, which is what separates the book from most of the fiction that followed it.
Pohl was named a Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master in 1993 and wrote a sequel, Mars Plus, with Thomas T. Thomas in 1994.