Frederick Pohl's Man Plus has been on my want-to-read list for about, oh, 22 years. That's when I first saw it in the school library. I don't recall reading the jacket, but the title conjured visions of sweeping, far-future science fiction. Well, I finally got around to it; it is every bit as good as I had hoped. It's not the epic novel of my lofty imagination, but is something more fun and accessible with a great story and fantastic characters.
Just a brief description of the setting: it's the near future, an Earth near the brink of WW3, and the President of the U.S. is staking his legacy on an extremely unconventional space initiative: surgically altering and augmenting astronauts so they can live on the surface of Mars. With humanity on this planet in it's 11th hour, such radical steps are deemed necessary, and polling seems to strongly support the initiative when details of it are leaked. Roger Torraway ends up being the astronaut chosen for the trip to Mars. Most of his body is upgraded with prostheses, such as bug-like eyes that can see beyond the visible spectrum, and collapsible wings to capture solar or microwave radiation. A backpack supercomputer augments his reality in extraordinary ways.
There's one horrific or funny scene (depending on point of view), where NASA bureaucracy fouls up, almost destroying the program (and for it to seem funny, you've got to see it as a parody of the long history of NASA's disdainful attitude towards how much astronauts needed to know). It is summed up in the official-ese: "We had not properly estimated the trauma Roger Torraway would receive from the loss of his genitals...."
The story centers around his transformation into a superhuman creature. I don't think it'll be giving too much away to say that he eventually does reach Mars. There are some almost poetic descriptions of what Mars might be like.
...He really wanted that very much, to stroll the ebony surface of a Barsoomian night, with the stars pinpoints of color in a velvet black sky. It was easy enough to see the brighter stars even by daylight, especially for Roger, but at night they were fantastic... steel-blue Sirius, bloody Aldebaran, the smoky gold of Polaris. By expanding his visible spectrum into the infrared and ultraviolet he could see new, bright stars whose names he did not know...
It's a character and plot-driven work, with technology described only as far as suits the story. There are several sex scenes, each leaving a judicious amount (nearly all) to the imagination. The final chapter broaches the topic of transhumanism (without specifically naming it) in a clever way that ties it in with the plot and leaves the reader amazed. Written in the mid-1970's it still seems contemporary in language and, for the most part, in technology. This is a classic work of science fiction; highly recommended!
