It happened! After a bit of a stretch due to travel and summer vacations and whatnot we finally reconvened the SFSFBQ for yet another great installment.
We met down at the Chieftain at Howard and 5th, where we had Irish Nachos, Fried Mashed Potatoes, and beer! Yum!
Up for discussion this time around: Frederik Pohl's 1976 Nebula Award winning Man Plus. We chose this because someone requested we read a robot book. Unfortunately, while robots certainly show up in many books and are even main characters (Dan Simmons' Ilium and Olympos, Iain Banks' Culture series and Against A Dark Background, China Mieville's Perdido Street Station), the books out there that are classics and about robots are penned mostly by one guy mostly: Asimov. His Robot Series, and the contributions by Silverberg (Positronic Man) are definite must read classics, however some people in the Qlub had already read those books and the consensus was: they are fucking boring. They are. Come on, you have to admit it, they are. And they are hard to reread. So, we ended up more in the cyborg genre, which was close enough.
Man Plus is the story of changing a human into a being capable of surviving on Mars, via technological implantation and augmentation. The book brings up many questions of identity, manipulation via the senses and data, sexuality, and acceptance.
Some of the topics that came up were:
-Social acceptance and Manpons:
-Alien intelligence, evolution, and xenopsychology
-The trope of "Emergent" intelligence: The Terminator, Ken MacLeod's The Star Fraction.
-Proper bedside manner.
The general consensus of the group was: Man Plus was definitely not a bad read. It was quick, straightforward, and light, though none of the characters were very realistic and the ending left many lose threads dangling (they emasculate the main character... literally, but with the intention of someday returning him to a human body... but where were they going to get replacement parts for his junk?). It introduced to the reader many topics and ideas, and did not attempt to answer any of them, and portrayed some pretty dated ideas on future sexuality. That being said, that book is screaming to be updated.
We concluded SFSFBQ with a new genre to explore: Space Opera!
