WHO? - ALGIS BUDRY — Out Here.

My pen-pal sent me this book the day before I left on a trip to Hong Kong and I read it on the flight over. He said he’d found the book in one of those free library things you see in nicer neighborhoods and thought the cover was too good and the story too weird to just place back so he sent it to me. I read it on the flight over to China and it is certainly strange. It’s about a man who’s captured by the Soviets and is inexplicably returned as a sort of cyborg. The book revolves around the quest to figure out if this “person” is the scientist who was kidnapped and who the robo-man is saying he is, or if this is some sort of Soviet trick. It’s always funny to see Sci-Fi set in what is now the past (the book takes place in the then-future 1980s) with entities like the Soviet Union that no longer exist. It makes you think about what aspects of our life do we assume will extend into the future but won’t. Prehaps the War on Terror, maybe the internet, or America itself. The book follows the quest of a government agent to look into the robo-man’s background in order to see if he’s who he says he is and most of the book is spent on these flash backs. The robo-man-man in a pretty standard sci-fi trope, the cold genius scientist, and we see how he became a genius and fell in love and got a job working on a top-secret weapons program. All of this is only sort of interesting. There are some weird scenes where the cyborg is wondering around the country just doing his thing that are pretty good but overall the book was dull. Fine to read on a plane. 3 Robots.