The Modular Man

Allen, Roger MacBride. The Modular Man. New York: Bantam, [1992]. (Bantam is part of Bantam Doubleday Dell [sic] Publishing Group, Inc.). With an essay by Isaac Asimov, "Intelligent Robots and Cybernetic Organisms" (cited under Literary Criticism). "The Next Wave / Book 4."

Perhaps too philosophically rigorous for its esthetic good, MM is an important S. F. thought-experiment on cyborgs, total prosthesis, and the mind/body problem. A robotics experts transfers his mind into a house maintenance unit (a very fancy vacuum cleaner—now a robot), in the process killing his body; when the robot is charged with murdering the man, the man's wife (a quadriplegic attorney who operates a remote body) defends the robot in court. Insightfully raises philosophical, legal, economic, and ethical questions. Cf. and contrast the following works. For when a machine becomes human: I. Asimov's "Bicentennial Man," R. Zelazny's "For a Breath I Tarry"; for a woman operating a highly advanced waldo version of herself: T. Lee's Electric Forest and J. Tiptree, Jr.'s "The Girl Who Was Plugged In"; for human minds inside machines: J. McElroy's Plus, K. O'Donnell's Mayflies, J. Sladek's The Müller-Fokker Effect (and the works crosslisted with those entries); for total prosthesis: D. Knight's "Masks," C. L. Moore's "No Woman Born," and F. Pohl's Man Plus—all cited under Fiction. For economic issues, note J. Swift's Struldbrugs in ch. 10 of "A Voyage to Laputa" in Gulliver's Travels (cited by its more formal vt in this section), and the Struldbrugs's more immediately relevant S. F. incarnation in Frederik Pohl's and C. M. Kornbluth's Gladiator-at-Law (Ballantine 1955, rpt. Baen 1986), a novel featuring a pair of obscenely rich people who get richer by technologically extending their lives.

(RDE, 11/07/93)