(from the book jacket)
Roger Torraway watched in horror as the monster lurched,
toppled over and died. Project Man Plus
had gone suddenly and drastically wrong.
The race to colonize Mars was too important, too costly, and
America was already too committed, for plans to be scrapped. They would have to make a new Martian. And Roger Torraway was it, candidate for the
endless surgery, operation after painful operation, that would enable him to
survive on that faraway planet.
Man Plus is a thrilling race against time – to land on Mars
on schedule, to insure that Roger’s system will withstand the stress that
killed the previous candidate. And,
meanwhile, somewhere, somehow, there has been a breakdown in the computer
network…
Man Plus is about Roger who, after the previous candidate
dies, is entered into a program to change his biology enough that he can
survive on Mars. It is more about the
way Roger reacts to the things that are happening to him and the way people
react to him than it is about the trip to Mars.
Roger knows that it is an honor to be chosen for the mission but he is
going in knowing the process killed the man before him and had made him into
something other than human. And as his
appearance changes the people around him start to treat him less and less like
a person. And the loss of his humanity
piece by piece puts mental and emotional stress on him on top of the physical
stresses of the process. It was
interesting to see how he had to learn to use all of his senses again and to
understand the new way his brain processes the new information coming in. His frustration and anger starts to show when
he can’t even do something simple, like close his eyes. I liked the internal struggle Roger was faced
with, and I liked watching the change in him as the process moved along, but
there were other parts that were not so interesting. I wish some of the other characters were
developed more or left out completely because they sometimes seemed to be in
the way of the story and were more distracting than anything else. Especially his love interests. The whole book is told by a narrator who is
not identified until the very end. But
it felt less like a twist and more like the start of an unrelated
storyline. I liked the main plot and
storyline and it kept me reading to see where it was going. But I’m not in any hurry to track down the
sequel. In the end I am not sorry I read
it, it was enjoyable, and if you come across it I would say you should give it
a try but I wouldn’t say it was worth making a big effort to look for it.
