< previous page page_166 next page >

Page 166
ce798b5ef163c3580ef142fbd570a210.gif ce798b5ef163c3580ef142fbd570a210.gif
Suppose one takes the standard human frame and alters some of the optional equipment. There's nothing to breathe on Mars. So take the lungs out of the human frame, replace them with micro-miniaturized oxygen regeneration cat-cracking systems. One needs power for that, but power flows down from the distant sun.
ce798b5ef163c3580ef142fbd570a210.gif ce798b5ef163c3580ef142fbd570a210.gif
. . . The solar panels [attached to his shoulder blades] . . . did resemble bat wings.
ce798b5ef163c3580ef142fbd570a210.gif ce798b5ef163c3580ef142fbd570a210.gif
. . . by the time he was on Mars, he would really need to eat only about one square meal a month . . . of the diagnostic signs of manhood . . . what was left was nothing at all. [Roger Torraway became] a strange devil-like creature.
But he is not a devil in the mold of Clarke's Childhood's End, for he is emphatically not alien. Throughout the novel we sympathetically follow Roger's plight, feel his struggle to fulfill his human mission against the incredible assault of his image of himself. When he finally succeeds in surviving on the surface of Mars, a pioneer who makes possible the following of other humans, we understand Roger as human. He is not a Wellsian monster nor even one of Bradbury's gentle throwbacks: he is an image of man freed from the chauvinism of any particular bodily form. (. . .)
Pohl's novel has a rather interesting twist at the end. The last chapter begins with this sentence: "We had gone to a lot of trouble at every point along the line, and we were well pleased." "We" turns out to be the worldwide, autonomous and linked consciousness of "machine intelligence,'' a voice that speaks for "every brother in the net." In an instant, the reader realizes that the computer output that had urged Roger's reconstruction had been a conclusion not of men using computers but of the computers themselves. If Roger was a prisoner of the "brother" on his back, then we are all in danger! And yet, within half a page, we come to discard that homocentric attitude. After all, the world was in danger of catastrophic war and the Mars Project did save it. So we have to agree when the computer voice says, "We had saved our race. And in the process we had significantly added to the safety of human beings, as well." And, by the way, a perfectly fit and desirable human woman elects to stay on Mars as Roger's lover.
Eric S. Rabkin, "Science and the Human Image in Recent Science Fiction," Michigan Quarterly Review 24, No. 2 (Spring 1985): 261, 263
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Thomas Clareson
In Black Star Rising (1985), Pohl has produced a delightfully caustic satire deserving a high place in the tradition

 
< previous page page_166 next page >