Charles Neumann has a deep relationship with his phone. So deep that when he spotted the device after he mis-placed it one day, he immediately reached for it - forgetting that he was in his lab and in the middle of initalizing a large clamp. You know, literally in the middle of the clamp. He says goodbye to his leg, when not one paragraph before he had proclaimed "The equipment had safeties but your primary piece of protective equipment was your brain. There was a presumption that anyone entering this room was intelligent enough to keep away from hot things, sharp things, and things carrying large stores of momentum." Ironic? Pretty sure Max Barry likes to think he's pretty clever. And he is, look at Charles' last name: Neumann. Haha.
After losing his leg, Charles, scientist at research company Better Future and MIT engineering grad ala Tony Starks, starts buliding his own leg in his lab. Unlike Tony, Charles is not a diva or a hero. He's not out to show-off his fireworks shooting mech which just happen to have evil-combating side features, he just wants parts for himself. Before his accident, he was physically scrawny and weak, nobody paid much attention to him. Equipped with his new mechincal leg suddenly everyone finds him fascinating. The Company fully funds his artifical parts resarch and gives him a huge team of lab assistants.
The rest of the book is a little predictable - of course the intentions of the Company are not completely honorable - this is a Max Barry novel, remember that novel of his he named, um, well "Company"? Charles becomes obessed with building better and better parts for himself. Of course, every system from chemical reactions to CPU processor stage pipelines are limited by their slowest part. The slowest part becomes a bottleneck. Charles contiunally feels hampered by his biological parts. Completely logically, he chops off his remaining leg. Then he chops off some fingers. Wouldn't everyone do the same? And yet, when Charles' team comes up with Z-lenses and Z-contacts, eyewear that lets the user zoom in and out in real life, Charles feels distrubed. He's distrubed by lenses that zoom when his leg has wi-fi. Great guy. Then the company starts jumping in and things start getting messy.
At this point in the novel my mind started wondering when my attention was completely held before. Regardless Machine Man is a well-executed novel, stoically hailrious in parts, and gruesomely gory in others, that will make you question how far technology should go.
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