Machine Man (Not the good Marvel character, it's a novel)

The sort of crazy rabbit lady at my work asked me to watch the rabbits outside, to make sure no one attacked them. I said sure, because no ones going around attacking rabbits (not wabbit season).

"Thank you. Is there a charge for this service?"

"Uh. No."

Could you imagine if I said yes? What a horrible person I'd be!

Moving on, so after "It's Superman!" (which, having finally mentioned on the ol' blog, I can FINALLY return to the buildings little library. Lightens my load. Decreases my clutter.) I read "Machine Man" by Max Barry. It's the story of an engineer who loses a leg in a lab accident and then, unsatisfied with the prosthetics he's given, builds himself a great leg... way better than his remaining human leg.

Well that's a problem he can surely solve! Off with his other leg!

It's, uh, a pretty slippery slope that the guy jumps off of (wait, I thought it was slippery? He jumped?! He's got no legs!). It's actually a pretty disturbing book, with its phantom limb pain, Doc Ock style hearing voices from the mechanical legs, a prosthetician with something of an amputee fetish (gotta love what you do, right?)...

The book is notable to me for a couple of reasons. The protagonist is amazingly incapable of empathy. The story is told in first person narration, so we're right inside this guys head, and because he cares so little for the thoughts of others there's almost zero speculation about those other peoples feelings. I'm so used to the first person narrator being a writer (say, Dr. Watson, or a better example being any Hemingway protagonist) that it's very jarring to have a narrator so very removed from other peoples perception. And it's not just that the guy has a warped perception of the inner lives of others, which would in turn reflect on his own inner life- but he just doesn't care. He rarely considers other people at all. Man was that weird.

The other thing of note has to do with the process the novel was written with. Daily updates to a web site with the content of the various chapters, often as short as a couple of hundred words, telling the story of this Charles Neumann (blargh that last name is obvious- and that's a criticism from a guy that always gives names that are way too obvious! This is just too much!) with a constant back and forth of critiquing chatter with the sites various visiting commentators. In effect the novel is a collaborative effort. I mean, more so than usual.

Not a whole lot on this planet that isn't a collaborative effort.

All the time while reading this book, whenever the main character was wearing the prosthetic legs he designed, I couldn't help but imagine the guy to be walking around like he was 7 or 8 feet tall. If he walked near a door I'd have to duck in my chair while reading, emulating how he MUST have been going through doors and such. See? I've got empathy coming out the yinyang. Wow, uh, when I actually write that, "yinyang", but does it look and sound inappropriate.

That's probably all I need to say about that. The cover has a drawing of a dude with an awesome moustache. Then the title takes its place in the middle, then scary giant robot legs. Pretty cool cover. Also creepy.