Man Plus by Frederik Pohl
Aug. 17th, 2003 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinA couple of weeks ago I went with Sam to a used-book store and got some good stuff from their science-fiction section, mostly classics that I had never gotten around to reading.
One of those was Man Plus by Frederik Pohl. Much like Pohl's masterpiece Gateway, this is a 1940s-esque title and 1940s concept executed with thoroughly 1970s sensibility, setting and prose. I like that combination a lot, though part of it is just the comforting realization that the current world political situation could be a lot worse than it is; serious Seventies SF tended to take place in really fucked-up future worlds. In this case, the United States is an increasingly violence-wracked and authoritarian island in the midst of a world overrun by Commies handing us a thousand Vietnams, some of them fought with small nukes; and beneath a veneer of détente, the whole shebang seems to be lurching toward global thermonuclear war.
The only hope (or is it?) is the colonization of Mars, with the help of men surgically modified into superhuman cyborg monsters so they can live naked on its surface. Pohl does a good job of getting inside his cyborg's head while the poor guy deals with the agonies of his conversion, his marital problems and his sexual hang-ups (this is very much a Seventies Sexual Revolution world of rampant swingerhood and "open marriages"), in a setting of the insular community of American astronauts desperately trying to forget that the world is falling apart around them. Eventually the modified man goes to Mars and has a peculiar adventure there conditioned by the subjective distortions associated with his augmented nervous system.
The treatment of computers in the novel is dated in the peculiar Seventies way too. For some reason I'm fascinated by the 1970s attitude toward computers, probably because it conditioned my own thinking in childhood. They were getting cheaper and smaller and starting to appear everywhere, but most people only had contact with them as unseen refrigerator-sized devices lurking in the shadows of bureaucracies, and there was still some of that misplaced trust in the oracular pronouncements of computers that you see in Fifties movies. The sense was that mysterious machines were encroaching on life from the margins, not front-and-center like they suddenly became in the eighties. The iconic image was the giant spinning magtape drive. In Man Plus people are forever citing the results of computer simulations of social evolution as if they could somehow be trusted: it's "Limits to Growth" writ large, or maybe Asimov's psychohistory writ small.
Also, there's the assumption, significant to the plot, that most computers are connected through some sort of global network. Today this probably seems prescient, but it was actually a common understanding of Seventies SF (think of Colossus: the Forbin Project in which the out-of-control supercomputer finds its unknown Soviet counterpart through the net). My recollection is that most people of the time thought all computers were already networked to a greater degree than they really were.
One of those was Man Plus by Frederik Pohl. Much like Pohl's masterpiece Gateway, this is a 1940s-esque title and 1940s concept executed with thoroughly 1970s sensibility, setting and prose. I like that combination a lot, though part of it is just the comforting realization that the current world political situation could be a lot worse than it is; serious Seventies SF tended to take place in really fucked-up future worlds. In this case, the United States is an increasingly violence-wracked and authoritarian island in the midst of a world overrun by Commies handing us a thousand Vietnams, some of them fought with small nukes; and beneath a veneer of détente, the whole shebang seems to be lurching toward global thermonuclear war.
The only hope (or is it?) is the colonization of Mars, with the help of men surgically modified into superhuman cyborg monsters so they can live naked on its surface. Pohl does a good job of getting inside his cyborg's head while the poor guy deals with the agonies of his conversion, his marital problems and his sexual hang-ups (this is very much a Seventies Sexual Revolution world of rampant swingerhood and "open marriages"), in a setting of the insular community of American astronauts desperately trying to forget that the world is falling apart around them. Eventually the modified man goes to Mars and has a peculiar adventure there conditioned by the subjective distortions associated with his augmented nervous system.
The treatment of computers in the novel is dated in the peculiar Seventies way too. For some reason I'm fascinated by the 1970s attitude toward computers, probably because it conditioned my own thinking in childhood. They were getting cheaper and smaller and starting to appear everywhere, but most people only had contact with them as unseen refrigerator-sized devices lurking in the shadows of bureaucracies, and there was still some of that misplaced trust in the oracular pronouncements of computers that you see in Fifties movies. The sense was that mysterious machines were encroaching on life from the margins, not front-and-center like they suddenly became in the eighties. The iconic image was the giant spinning magtape drive. In Man Plus people are forever citing the results of computer simulations of social evolution as if they could somehow be trusted: it's "Limits to Growth" writ large, or maybe Asimov's psychohistory writ small.
Also, there's the assumption, significant to the plot, that most computers are connected through some sort of global network. Today this probably seems prescient, but it was actually a common understanding of Seventies SF (think of Colossus: the Forbin Project in which the out-of-control supercomputer finds its unknown Soviet counterpart through the net). My recollection is that most people of the time thought all computers were already networked to a greater degree than they really were.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-18 12:54 am (UTC)