Man Plus
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Man Plus is the 1976 Nebula Award-winning science fiction novel by Frederik Pohl.
[edit] Plot introduction
In order to survive in the thin Martian atmosphere, Roger Torraway's body must be replaced with an artificial one. At every step he becomes more and more disconnected from Earth and its people, unable to feel things in his new body. It is only after arriving on Mars that his new body begins to make sense to him. It is perfectly adapted to this new world, and thus he becomes perfectly separated from his old world, and from humanity.
[edit] Major themes
A common theme in science fiction is existentialist isolation, whether isolation starting from within, or the separation of human beings from other species, or the effects of the isolation of Earth from the rest of the universe by great distances. Those who admire Man Plus say that it delves deeper into this theme than most novels of the genre; others have found it derivative and repetitive. In Man Plus, a human being is transformed into a cyborg being. The physical transformation is examined in great detail as it is echoed in the increasing distance between Roger Torraway and his wife, and between Roger and the rest of humanity.
Man Plus also makes much of the (assumed, rather than argued) difficulty of separating the way you think from what you are, and vice versa: Roger Torraway's new artificial body strongly affects how he treats the world around him.
