Machine Man by Max Barry

Brief summary of the first dozen pages:

Super logical engineer dude gets his leg crushed in an industrial accident, loses it. The prosthetics he’s presented with are crap, so he builds his own new leg. He then find his flesh leg inferior and incompatible with his new leg. What’s a fella to do?

I had fun with this book. Max Barry knows how to write something that keeps moving along without being completely plot-driven.

Some would say it’s philosophy 97 (4 less than 101), but I’d say the idea of whether a person is a body or a body a person is something that warrants reexamining as technology progresses.

The most interesting theory in this book is the question of why we create mechanical and technological substitutes for things only to mimic their biological or natural counterparts. How much money did someone sink into creating e-ink when we already had ink, and why didn’t they try to come up with something altogether new an improved?

Like I’ve said, author/idol Tom Spanbauer always says writers should do three things to an audience: Make them laugh, Teach them something, and Break their hearts.

Make Them Laugh:
Main Character on Love: “I had gone seven years without kiss and now I’d had two in a week. It was the kind of data event that implied serious contamination of laboratory conditions.”

Teach Them Something:
Main Character’s Speech to Girlfriend After She Hangs Onto the Salt at the Dinner Table: “Everything is a system. Look.” I leaned forward. “What if I had your water and I suddenly decided I wanted the salt? And instead of giving you back the water I just sat here waiting for you to release the salt, which you didn’t because you were waiting for the water? It’s a deadlock, that’s what. It’s catastrophic system failure. And you’re probably thinking, ‘Well, I could just ask Charlie to give me the water in exchange for the salt.’ But that requires you to understand my resource needs, and violates process encapsulation. I’m not saying it’s a big deal. I’m just pointing out that locking the salt like that in incredibly inefficient and systematically dangerous.”

Break their Hearts:
[I’ll leave this one alone because I don’t want to give out all the details here]

Fun book. It sags somewhere near the end when it turns into an all-out action film and loses some of that emotional core. But it’s close enough.