Experts advise the President that problems plaguing poorer countries and the expansionist policies of the Chinese mean that global war and extinction are inevitable. Buoyed by America's burgeoning military-industrial combine, the President gives the green light for project Man Plus: the creation of a pantropic cyborg - a surgically engineered man who can live on Mars and prepare the planet for colonization. Roger Torroway is a typical astronaut: atheletic, clean-cut, married, antiseptically bland, conventionally glib. Catapulted to fame by his presence on board a space station that participates in the rescue of a stricken Russian Mercury mission, Torroway has 'the right stuff'. Working as an observer on the project when the astronaut selected for the bionic augmentations dies from the traumas his body has undergone, Torroway finds himself substituted in the role of Man Plus. We follow the conversion of man to machine in unflinching, persuasive detail. Torroway adapts to the replacement of his eyes and the grafting of solar-panel wings but some unexpected operations come as a shock to the astronaut and reader. Uncompromisingly depicting with surgical coolness the mental anguish Torroway experiences as he is transformed into something both more and less than human, Man Plus anticipates cyberpunk and withholds nothing in its examination of the merciless advance of scientific logic as political expediency casts ethics by the wayside. Narrated in a dispassionate voice by an anonymous narrator whose identity is key to the story, the chilling flatness of Man Plus erupts when Torroway sets foot on Mars itself.

Pohl began his career as a magazine editor in 1940. He wrote extensively with Jack Williamson and C.M. Kornbluth, with whom he produced the classic The Space Merchants (1953), which describes a future world dominated by advertizing. This novel had a huge impact in determining the possibilities for 1950s' social SF: although his work began in the Campbellian era, Pohl has always helped to determine the future of the genre through measured work as an editor, anthologist and writer. With George W. Bush urging NASA toward Mars while questions of American hegemony remain contentious, Man Plus is surprisingly relevant.

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