pocket universe novel

Cory Doctorow at 6:17 am • •

Adam Christopher's debut novel Empire State is a noir, Philip K Dick-ish science fiction superhero story about a pocket universe that's created when two battling New York superheroes open a vent through spacetime. New York City is reflected through this vent into the pocket, and in the distorted surface of the pinched-off bubble of reality, the city is reflected back in strange, existential form. The new city is called Empire State, and it is a grey, washed-out version of New York, perpetually shrouded in mist, perpetually at war, and the brave lads of Empire State are forever being wired into the bodies of robots and sent off in seagoing Ironclads, warships that never return.

New York and Empire State are imperfect mirrors of one another, and only a handful of people in either city know or suspect of the existence of the other. Some people are mirrored in the new world, versions of themselves that are either convincingly like the original, or their polar opposite, or something in between. The year is 19, nineteen years after the creation of Empire State, and the war slogs on, and the strange, violent bureaucracy that runs the city and persecutes the war tightens up the rationing and prohibition that make life even darker in Empire State.

This is a novel of surreal resonances, things that are like other things, plot turns that hearken to other plot turns. It's often fascinating, as captivating as a kaleidoscope, especially if you don't spend too much time trying to figure out the mechanics of the setup, the physics of the worlds. Just let it wash over you, the way that Jonathan Lethem's phildickian debut Gun, With Occasional Music does, and don't think too hard -- just feel it in all its weird glory.

This is a promising debut, and the publisher, Angry Robot, is pursuing a great promotion: WorldBuilder, "our way of reaching out to the fan creator communities, to invite you to come play in our yard." It's an official, sanctioned place where fans and pros can work together to create new media inspired by Empire State and its superheroes, hard-boiled dicks, traitors, madmen, cult leaders, and endless war.

Empire State

Walking Dead 15: We Find Ourselves - a moment's respite after years of grinding, terrifying hopelessness

Cory Doctorow at 6:00 am • •

I've been reading The Walking Dead comic series for years now, with the kind of sick, compulsive horror that is the mark of great dramatic tension in narrative. One of the surest ways to establish dramatic tension is to have a characters in bad situations who are trying intelligently to solve their problems, failing, and falling into worse situations. Key to this is that the characters have to try intelligent solutions to their problems, because otherwise the story becomes an exercise in watching a fly batter itself to death on a windowpane.

The Walking Dead is one of those zombie stories in which the intelligent solutions attempted by each character represents a kind of local maximum, the best action for that person at that minute, but disastrous in combination. In that sense, it's a kind of extended riff on the collective action problem, the age-old conundrum of figuring out how to work together for a common goal that will improve all our lives in the end, when there's always a good, immediate opportunity to pursue one's immediate advantage -- and when, at any moment, someone else in the group might seize on that opportunity and shut you out of it.

So previous volumes of Walking Dead have demonstrated the problems and promise of strong-man authoritarianism, family groups, nomadic collectives, fortress societies, limited democracies, individual autonomy, and every other variation and permutation, presenting the reader with the twin fascination and horror of watching a group of characters each acting (more or less) intelligently, but collectively behaving like a fly battering itself to death on the proverbial windowpane.

Now, after 14 volumes, we have the fifteenth Walking Dead compendium: We Find Ourselves, in which the characters finally, finally figure out how to work for their common interests, after years and years of slaughter and tragedy and horror. I read the book over Christmas, and it was like a holiday gift from the creators to their faithful readers -- a respite in the relentless grind that these infuriating and brave people have had to endure and that we've had to watch.

And of course, I'm already feeling mounting anxiety at the thought of what will befall this embryonic glimmer of hope in the volumes that are to come.

And that's dramatic tension.

Walking Dead Volume 15: We Find Ourselves

Previous Walking Dead collections

Patry's How to Fix Copyright: deftly argued, incandescent book on the evidence-free state of copyright law

Cory Doctorow at 10:31 am • •

William Patry is no copyright radical. He's the author of some of the major reference texts on copyright, books that most copyright lawyers would have on their bookcases, books like Patry on Copyright. But Patry -- once copyright counsel to the US House of Representatives and policy planning advisor to the US Register of Copyrights -- is furious with the current state of copyright law, and he's marshalled his considerable knowledge of copyright and combined it with his considerable talent as a writer to produce a new book, How to Fix Copyright, a book that is incandescent in every sense of the word.

How to Fix Copyright is a superbly argued, enraging book on the state of copyright law today, one of the great evidence-free zones in policymaking, where every measure is taken on faith and whose results are never seriously measured (except by tame, partisan researchers who always conclude that more draconian laws are in order). Patry dismantles the arguments for "strong" copyright protection like a top chef deboning a fish, deftly carving away the industry rhetoric and leaving behind the evidence.

The evidence is grim. Bad copyright law, enacted on the basis of flimsy, cooked statistics (or worse, purely anaecdotal "evidence") is not serving to enrich artists, though it is funneling enormous wealth to their corporate publishers, studios and labels (especially the executive suites in those firms, where compensation in the tens of millions is handed out by firms that are "dying of piracy"). These laws are dismantling our culture, criminalizing our children and neighbors, attacking our cherished institutions, and distorting the progress of poor nations around the world.

Throughout the text, Patry offers two important (but rare) commodities: facts, and solutions. Patry's work is heavily footnoted, and his footnotes are generous, sometimes lengthy discursions, often citing primary, peer-reviewed works. Not cooked industry statistics, but impartial evidence from economists, social scientists, and creators modern and ancient. As to solutions, Patry notes that his publisher wanted him to include a list of bullet-point solutions at the end of the book, an approach he rejected because these aren't simple problems -- they're difficult and nuanced, and so are his solutions, so they're best couched in the arguments they refer to. I agree with this approach, though two of Patry's suggestions are simple enough: first, stop making new copyright laws until we know whether the current ones are working (we'll have to define what they're supposed to be doing first!); and second, make no new laws without a strong, impartial evidentiary basis.

Funnily enough, these two suggestions do mark Patry out as a copyright radical by modern standards. Copyright is supposed to be an unassailable doctrine of faith, and asking to see the evidence of supposed gigantic monetary and job losses due to piracy, or supposed gigantic contributions to the GDP and balance of trade as a result of the industries, makes you a loony heretic in the contemporary debate.

Patry currently works as Senior Copyright Counsel at Google, and he is also a clarinetist -- in other words, he is both well-versed in technology and an artist himself. This puts him in a nearly unique position among copyright lawyers, and it's no wonder that he's one of copyright's best scholars. And while How to Fix Copyright is a book full of anger, it's never shrill or strident (though it's a good deal less calm than Patry's previous popular law book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars).

How to Fix Copyright

Rumpole at Christmas: curmudgeonly stories for a heartwarming holiday

Cory Doctorow at 6:38 am • •

I'm a lifelong fan of Rumpole, John Mortimer's grumpy, poetry-spouting criminal defense barrister, star of books, TV, and radio. John Mortimer died in 2009, and Rumpole at Christmas was published last Christmas season, but I missed it then. I just picked up a copy and inhaled it in a day, and I'm back to tell you just how pleasurable it was.

Rumpole at Christmas consists of seven Christmas stories, all published in magazines or broadcast on radio between 2001 and 2007. Each is a perfect little Rumpole tale, in which the grumpy, fat lawyer confronts and rejects modernity, exposes hypocrisy, drinks a lot of cheap wine, smokes many cheap cigars, and allows just a sliver of sentimental softness to peek out amid the murders and crimes. Mortimer's Rumpole is witty and rhetorical, his internal monologue a perpetual rehearsal for a jury he hopes to sway with sly humour, generally at the expense of authority figures, faddish trends, and propriety.

Six of the stories are short enough to read aloud around a roaring fire over whiskeys, the seventh, Rumpole and the Health Farm Murder, is just the right length for reading before bed. I've been reading Rumpole since I was a boy, and while Mortimer left us a mountain of Rumpole stories, they'll never be enough.

Rumpole at Christmas

Yellow Kid Weil: Autobiography of the greatest con man in American history

Cory Doctorow at 6:37 am • •

Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil may have been the greatest American swindler of all time. The Yellow Kid operated in the gold age of the American con, from the late 19th century up to WWII, and became a legend in his own time, immortalized in such books as The Big Con (the sociological study of con artists that was the basis for the movie The Sting).

The first edition of "Yellow Kid" Weil, the as-told-by autobiography of the cheerful crook, was published in 1948. It was long out of print, but it was reprinted in 2010 by AK Press, and it's one of the most entertaining memoirs of the era.

Students of con games will know the basic mechanics -- many of which Weil claims to have invented -- and will know that some legitimate contemporary business practices, such as giving away high-priced premiums to sell commodity goods and stocking department stores with flashy, cheap goods that are priced as though they were being sold at a great discount, came to prominence as part of elaborate con-games and only later were institutionalized as normal business.

But the real, serious, high-octane cons were practiced with a cast from two to 200, using elaborate sets, timing and staging, and usually involved a faked-up plan to cheat on horse races, real estate or the stock market. This plan always went awry somehow, and ended with all the participants losing their shirts (as far as the mark knew, anyway -- in reality, his "pal" the con-man lost nothing and would split the take with the inside man).

Weil's autobiography is really more of a memoir -- it doesn't provide much of a coherent narrative of the man and his life. Rather, it is a series of unconnected -- but hugely entertaining -- anaecdotes about the various scams he ran and the venal fools he took for thousands and tens of thousands of dollars. Weil is a virtuoso exploiter of human foibles, and each story serves as a miniature morality play in which someone who thinks he's getting something for nothing (usually at some innocent's expense) instead loses everything as payback for his venality.

One glaring blindspot in Weil's narrative is Weil himself. He has practically no self-awareness, and there's virtually no sense of what's going on in his own head as he bilks and cons his way around the world. This omission is as striking as anything else in the book, and speaks volumes about how disassociated Weil was from his own ethics and morality. The final two chapters are the most poignant, as they are where Weil, now gone straight, accounts for himself and his deeds. He repeats the con-artist's shibboleth that he only cheated crooks who thought they were cheating others (though the book has plenty of contradictory examples he neglects to mention), but there is a glimmer of self-knowledge there that is all the more remarkable due to its absence elsewhere in the narrative.

This is one of the most entertaining memoirs I've ever read. Its episodic nature makes it a natural for quick reads -- a more perfect toilet-tank book there never was -- and the detailed descriptions of Depression-era cons are priceless, especially for anyone interested in gadgets and improvisation. The scam fortuneteller whose turban disguised a telephone clamped to his head, which was wired down his collar and trouser-leg to an electrical contact on the bottom of his shoe, which would be mated to a telephone circuit when the "swami" reclined on an "oriental lounger" to "commune with the spirit world" is one of the best things I've ever read.

"Yellow Kid" Weil

Moving House, sweet picture book about a house that lobbies to keep its family from moving out

Cory Doctorow at 6:02 am • •

Mark Siegel's Moving House is a picture book about a house that decides to keep its family from moving away by aggressively lobbying the children. The night before Joey and Chloe's family are to leave their house at Number Seven Carriage Street in Foggytown, they reminisce about all the things they love about their dear old home. The house stirs itself, stretches its legs, sprouts arms, and carries the kids up to a hilltop to show them that life in Foggytown needn't be so foggy. The kids, the house, the other buildings and the streetlamps conspire together to rescue Foggytown from its fog, and they move the whole place up to the top of a hill, and the house and the family are saved.

You may know Siegel's work from his wonderful Sailor Twain comics, and while there are some illustrations in Moving House that are very Twain-y, much of this is more straightforward, character-driven, kid-friendly illos (the house sauntering out of town with the kids in its hand is especially sweet). The writing is funny and charming, and the story is just weird enough, with a very satisfying and sentimental conclusion. It's a lot of fun to read aloud, and it's a great way to spark conversations about all the places in your home that are special to you and your kid(s).

Moving House

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Paintwork: cyberpunk++ stories of killer augmented reality mechas and QR code graffiti writers

Cory Doctorow at 6:21 am • •

Tim Maughan's self-published short story collection Paintwork collects three of his stories, including the British Science Fiction Award-nominated story "Havana Augmented."

In an era of "post-cyberpunk" science fiction, Maughan is firmly cyberpunk -- or maybe "cyberpunk++," a genre that captures all the grit and glory of technology with a higher degree of plausibility and respect for real computers and networks than the genre had in its glory days.

"Paintwork," the first story, is a noirish, Gibsonian story of a graffiti writer in an econopocalypse-scoured Bristol, whose specialty is elaborate augmented reality animations that he inserts into the public consciousness by overwriting the QR codes on advertisements. "Paparazzi" is a story of gaming celebrity and global economics, with a wry and funny take on gold-farming that went to a place no other writer has ventured. The final novella, "Havana Augmented," is justly famed as Maughan's best work today: a political games/AR thriller set in Havana, where a bootleg augmented reality mecha combat game becomes part of the Communist Party's plan to liberalize the country's economy, and the young rebel gamers who are caught up in the plot.

Maughan has a keen eye for the fictional possibilities of technology, a good hand with the what if/ten seconds in the future mode of storytelling, and he's quite adept at filling his work with hyper-cool eyeball kicks. These stories are fun and thought-provoking, a great combination.

Paintwork

Fiskars ShopBoss: multiscissors to the limit

Cory Doctorow at 3:12 pm • •

Writing for MAKE:, Gareth Branwyn reviews the Fiskars ShopBoss, a sucessor, of sorts, to the multi-scissors the company shipped last year. Fiskars is the Finnish giant of bladed tools, renowned for generations for its knives and other blades. Gareth really likes the ShopBoss though he has a few reservations:

The heart of the ShopBoss is a pair of titanium nitride-coated snippers/shears. The bottom blade is serrated and the snips are made to cut through light metals, carpet, cardboard, plastic stock, etc. They made easy work of most everything I chewed into with them, even some fairly thick acrylic. They cut CD media very easily and cleanly and would be a good tool to grab when CoasterBot building. It was a joy to process a giant pile of boxes, plastic banding, and cardboard destined for the recycling center.
Surrounding the snips are a number of other useful widgets: a wire-cutting jaw, a twine/binding strap cutter, bottle opener, and a pegboard hanging loop. The ShopBoss also comes with a plastic holster that clips onto your belt. It includes a pencil holder, a tape-cutting hook, and a metal deburring file (basically a piece of plastic rod).

Tool Review: Fiskars ShopBoss

Anatomy of a skyscraper: book examines skyscrapers as urban objects

Cory Doctorow at 8:05 am • •

Aggregat456 has a great review of a fascinating book called The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper, a heavily illustrated account of the underlying structure, social impact, engineering challenges and urban shifts of skyscrapers.

Similarly, The Heights uses its sumptuous graphics to present a performative and descriptive (i.e. anatomical) look at skyscrapers. To do so, Ascher abandons the impulse to conflate “skyscraper” with “architecture” and presents tall buildings more as urban objects. Repeating and elaborating the formula that made her earlier graphic study on infrastructure, The Works: Anatomy of a City (2005), so successful, Ascher offers the reader hundreds of drawings, as crisp as legible as anything offered by Ernst Neufert or Otto Neurath, all showing how skyscrapers are, in essence, compact, vertical cities. This emphasis on verticality goes well beyond the book’s title: The Heights is organized in a roughly vertical fashion, with some parts dedicated to the laying of foundations, and others showing how concrete is pumped towards upper floor plates via a complex series of compressors and tubes. (The table of contents even appears as an elevator control panel, which seems counter-intuitive unless one starts thinking of The Heights as vertical.)

Capsule Review: The Heights (via Crib Candy)

Sustainable Materials: indispensable, impartial popular engineering book on the future of our built and made world

Cory Doctorow at 7:06 am • •

Julian Allwood and Jonathan Cullen's Sustainable Materials - with Both Eyes Open: Future Buildings, Vehicles, Products and Equipment - Made Efficiently and Made with Less New Material is a companion volume to Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, one of the best books on science, technology and the environment I've ever read.

We review a lot of popular science books around here, but Sustainable Materials (like Sustainable Energy) is a popular engineering text, a rare and wonderful kind of book. Sustainable Materials is an engineer's audit of the materials that our world is made of, the processes by which those materials are extracted, refined, used, recycled and disposed of, and the theoretical and practical efficiencies that we could, as a society, realize.

Allwood and Cullen write about engineering with the elegance of the best pop-science writers -- say, James Gleick or Rebecca Skloot -- but while science is never far from their work, their focus is on engineering. They render lucid and comprehensible the processes and calculations needed to make things and improve things, touching on chemistry, physics, materials science, economics and logistics without slowing down or losing the reader.

The authors quickly demonstrate that any effort to improve the sustainability of our materials usage must focus on steel and aluminum, first because of the prominence of these materials in our construction and fabrication, and second because they are characteristic microcosms of our other material usage, and what works for them will be generalizable to other materials.

From there, the book progresses to a fascinating primer on the processes associated with these metals, from ore to finished product and back through recycling, and the history of efficiency gains in these processes, and the theoretical limits on efficiency at each stage. Lavishly illustrated and superbly organized, this section and the ones that follow it are a crash course in the invisible energy embodied in the bones of our built up world.

But the primary work of the book is to look at how small (and large) changes in our society and business could make important gains in the sustainability of our material use, an important subject as developing nations start to copy the rich world's insatiable appetite for material goods and titanic cities.

As with Sustainable Energy, Sustainable Materials is a valuable, impartial expert source in an important debate. While it explains the measures that can improve our materials usage, it also lays out the tradeoffs that these measures entails, the the relative benefits to be gained by each trade -- but it doesn't lecture or demand, merely invites the reader to consider the engineering facts and decide for herself what to do about them.

The publisher has put up a great website for the book, with free, downloadable text, and some good supplementary materials.

Sustainable Materials - with Both Eyes Open: Future Buildings, Vehicles, Products and Equipment - Made Efficiently and Made with Less New Material

Science Book Club: National Geographic's The Big Idea

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 2:52 pm • •

I have a weird relationship with coffee-table books. In general, I kind of think of them as clutter—like a particularly heavy and ungainly pile of junk mail that you can't just throw away. They're books to flip through and never really read again. For the rest of eternity, they just sit there, getting in your way while ostensibly telling your guests something about your personality and taste. To be quite honest, I lost most of my interest in coffee table books right around the point where I became old enough to conceivably own a coffee table.

But when I was a kid, coffee table books were magic.

Between the ages of 7 and 13, I owned more coffee table books than I will probably ever own again in my life. My favorite was a fat Readers' Digest tome on great disasters, full of prints of the Titanic schematics, medieval doctors lancing the buboes of plague victims, and photographs of the serene destruction at Lake Nyos. I read that thing so many times that I eventually broke the spine.

I still think kids and coffee table books go together like peanut butter and jelly. In late grade school and junior high, you're at an age where you still enjoy picture books but are looking for a bigger, deeper view of the world than most picture books provide. Coffee table books bridge that gap, offering grown-up perspectives in kid-friendly packages. Whether the topic is art, architecture, history, culture, or science—coffee table books can be a kid's first step into a subject they'll come to love as an adult.

Now that you know that context, let me tell you what I thought about one of National Geographic's newest coffee table books—The Big Idea: How Breakthroughs of the Past Shape the Future
.

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Boyett's Mortality Bridge: Rock n' roll Dante meets Orpheus

Cory Doctorow at 9:44 am • •

Mortality Bridge is Steven Boyett's first book since his comeback novel Elegy Beach, published last year as the 25-years-later sequel to his breakout novel Ariel. Superficially, Mortality Bridge is a very different novel from Boyett's earlier work, an existential horror novel about a man who goes to hell to rescue his lover, but like Boyett's best work, Mortality Bridge is a gutwrenching novel about loss and redemption, deserved guilt and betrayal, with an antihero whose quest is at once the stuff of cracking adventure stories and a tragic tale of facing up to one's own cowardice and weakness.

Niko is the antihero in question. Once a junkie rock-star who'd hit bottom, Niko signed a deal with the devil that rocketed him back to stardom, got him clean of his addictions, and brought back Jemma, the love of his life, whom he'd chased away with his doping and mercurial temper. What Niko didn't spot in the fine print of his diabolical deal was that his "chattels" were also forfeit to Hell, and now that Jemma has given him her heart, it has become his chattel, and so when Jemma begins a slow, agonizing death from cancer, Niko realizes that he has damned her along with himself.

Niko -- who has already been lost and redeemed once -- can't bear to let this come to pass. And so he formulates a mad and cunning plan to follow Death as he ferries Jemma's soul to hell, and there, he will play his guitar for the devils and the damned, and win back his love.

Boyett's Hell is steeped in mysticism and antiquity, borrowing freely from the Greeks, and Dante, and Bosch. Each turn in the underworld gives Boyett a fresh excuse to unlimber new grotesque phrases, stomach-churning descriptions of tortures too horrific to contemplate (though Boyett forcefully insists upon it).

Meanwhile, Niko's race through Hell is one of the greatest supernatural adventure stories of recent memory, surpassing Niven and Pournelle's classic Inferno (itself a very good novel on a similar premise, even if it does turn on the power of Hell to redeem one of history's great monsters). It is not a mere allegory about sin and redeption, cowardice and nobility: it's also a damned good story, which sets it apart from almost all existential allegories.

Mortality Bridge

Sample chapters

Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions: awesomely dangerous pranks from the age of fraternal lodges

Cory Doctorow at 6:07 am • •

Julia Suits's The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions: The Curious World of the Demoulin Brothers and Their Fraternal Lodge Prank Machines - from Human Centipedes and Revolving Goats to Electric Carpets and Smoking Camels is a history of those long-gone, much lamented days when Americans joined fraternal lodges in great numbers, and when those lodges attracted and retained members by subjecting new initiates to horrible, dangerous, violent pranks that often involved some combination of 35 cal blanks and high-voltage electricity.

You know, the good old days.

The Demoulin Brothers were the top of the fraternal order prank-gadget food-chain, publishing a secretive (but wildly popular) catalog that was distributed to lodge presidents and other mucky-mucks. The catalog featured inventions that could be used to terrorize (and delight) the members by simulating their executions, making them think they were to be horribly burned, and other delights of the simpler era when TV wasn't yet invented and radio was newfangled and untrustworthy.

Suits is a real scholar of those days, and she livens up the many reproductions from the various catalogs with great context-giving notes about the nature of these lodges, reprints from newspapers and magazine articles of the day that give a sense of their prominence and significance, and biographies of the mad geniuses who sold these gadgets for so many years.

From the demented copywriting in the catalogs to the fan-letters written to the company by excited lodge leaders who were delighted with the performance of the prank items, The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions is a time machine that transports readers to that gilded age and its highly specialized notions of fun and fraternity.

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The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories: trove of lost Dr Seuss stories

Cory Doctorow at 5:55 am • •

The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories is a collection of "lost" Dr Seuss stories culled from short stories published in magazines like Redbook in the 1940s and 1950s, collected and reprinted for the first time.

The publication of a new Seuss collection is reason to celebrate in and of itself, and Bippolo Seed is more than a curiosity or a completist's collection of offcuts -- much of the material in this book stands with Seuss's best-loved work. The illustrations are classic Seuss and full of wit and irreverence, though the ratio of words to pictures is a lot wordier than the typical Seuss, owing, I suppose, to the constraints of the original magazine publication. If I had to choose a favorite from among these, it'd be "The Great Henry McBride," (MP3) about a young fellow who can't make up his mind on a single career and demands that the world accommodate his wish for excitement and novelty through his whole life.

Of course, pictures are only half the story with Seuss, an author who really demands that he be read aloud. Random House has released a companion audiobook featuring absolutely smashing celebrity readings from the likes of Neal Patrick Harris, Anjelica Huston, Joan Cusack (MP3), and William H Macy (MP3) (along with others), and you can really hear how delighted and honored the readers are for the chance to work with this material. I wouldn't recommend getting the CD without the book (because Dr Seuss's illustrations are so integral to the stories), but it is an indispensable companion.

The book is introduced by Charles D Cohen, "renowned Seuss scholar," who gives a wordy but fascinating history of the stories, providing some excellent critical context for them.

The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories (Hardcover)

The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories (Audiobook)

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Machine Man: a discomfiting novel about the antihuman side of transhumanism

Cory Doctorow at 6:30 am • •

Max Barry's Machine Man is a disarmingly funny and light-feeling novel about an antisocial engineer who decides to create his own prosthetic leg after he loses his own in an industrial accident. Charles Neumann is an antisocial, technology-dependent scientist at a top secret military contractor's skunkworks. Dissatisfied with the prosthesis he is fitted with after he accidentally crushes his leg in a materials-testing machine, he sets out to create a better leg -- a leg that's so good you'd chop your own off to get it (this is also the battle-cry of the real-world open-source prosthetics movement). Which is precisely what he does.

What unfolds is a superficially simple, absurdist tale about a misfit geek who pursues a relentless and seemingly logical program of amputation and replacement. Barry uses this narrative to smuggle in a sly and insightful critique of the anti-human edges of the transhumanist movement, the place where transcendence of nature meets mortification of the flesh.

As with all of the best thought-provoking sf, Machine Man pulls this off without slowing down the action -- which involves some properly cinematic cyborg duelling and such -- and without sacrificing characterization. This is a really fantastic read and a thought-provoking one, too -- a great companion to such books as James Hughes's Citizen Cyborg.

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