“Are We Not Men?” (Altogether now: “We are Devo.”) (Yeah, if you are too young, you don’t get the joke. Google it.) According to my quick scan of Wikipedia, there is no link between that refrain and Algis Budrys’ novel Who?
But, there is certainly a common theme.
Who?, published in 1958, is included in the Library of America’s American Science Fiction, Five Classic Novels 1956-1958. (Curiously, this is the only edition in print. Add this to the seemingly endless set of kudos for the Library of America.)
The note at the back of the volume has the origin story. Budrys saw a painting of a man with a metal head and arm. A story was born. (I guess this makes the character in this novel the original Iron Man.)
The tale: Lucas Martino, a brilliant American scientist working on a mysterious substance K-88 is captured by the Russian after an explosion in the plant. Eventually the Russians agree to send Martino back home. Across the border comes a man with a metal head and a mechanical arm. Is this creature really Lucas Martino?
The novel follows the attempt of the American officials to figure this out. The Reader follows along in this journey as the evidence slides back and forth on the matter.
At one level, you can read this novel as simply a question of identity. Who are you? Could you prove that you are you? As one of the investigators screams in frustration, “Nobody—nobody in this whole world—can prove who he is, but we’re expecting this one man to do it.”
Imagine you came out of a hospital with a metal head. Could you prove your identity? That is what this novel seems to want you to ponder. How can you prove that you are you?
But, at this level, the novel is an absolute failure. Yep. You had no trouble figuring out how to prove that you are you. No matter how much you were interrogated by some enemy agents, you could not possibly reveal all the secrets of your life. So, it would be a trivial matter to have conversations with people whom you knew for a long time and talk about the past. No imposter could get through those conversations with everyone who knows you and your past.
How does the novel make this a challenge? It cheats. You see, Lucas Martino was a loner as a kid. His parents are dead. He worked for a year with his uncle, but his uncle, alas, also died. He only talked to one person throughout his entire college years, and, surprise, surprise, he is dead too. Apparently everyone else with whom he worked died in the explosion. (There are two people who knew Lucas when he was young who are still alive. Two. Sadly, neither is reliable.)
Even though the novel cheats, at this level the story is a pleasant enough read. It is interesting to try to figure out if the guy with the metal head is Martino or a Soviet agent pretending to be Martino so that the Soviets can discover the secrets of K-88. But, what seems like the philosophical problem is a dud.
But, Budrys turns out to be a clever writer after all. This isn’t really a story about proving that you are you.
The novel is asking a deeper question. What is the difference between man and machine?
As we discover in the flashback sections, Lucas Martino is rather clinical in his thought processes. He wanders through life like it is all one big technical problem to solve and he solves it and he moves on. His first crisis: “It was the first time in his life that he found himself unable to do what he ought to do, and it bothered him deeply. It made him angry.”
He had thought he understood himself, and had shaped himself to live most efficiently in his world. He had made plans on that basis, and seen no flaws in them…For one more moment before he had to get to work, he tried to decide how he could puzzle it all out and still learn not to waste his time analyzing things that couldn’t be changed.
So, when a guy with a mechanical head shows up and acts more like a robot than a human, is this a human or a machine? Is Lucas Martino himself a human or a machine? As the being with the mechanical head ruminates late in the novel:
“A man has no business buying machinery if he won’t treat it right. That’s a damned good design, that transmission. No reason in the world for anybody to have trouble with it.” His voice was almost querulous. “A machine won’t ever let you down, if you only take the trouble to use it right—use it the way you’re supposed to, for the jobs it’s built to do. That’s all. All you have to do is understand it. And no machine’s that complicated an average man can’t understand it. But nobody tries. Nobody thinks a machine’s worth understanding. What’s a machine, after all? Just a few pieces of metal. One’s exactly like another, and you can always get another one just like it.”
Reading that, it became apparent what Budrys is doing in this novel. The portrait of Lucas Martino is the portrait of a machine. The question: are all humans just machines?
An interesting question 60 years later. This idea that we are nothing more than mechanical machines made of meat is all the rage right now. As we peer deeper into the brain, you can hear the breathless excitement that one day we will crack humanity and show that there is no soul, no independent you, that you really are just a hunk of meat responding to external stimuli.
And if we hit that point, what happens to humanity. If humans are just machines, then…
Reread the mechanical head guy’s speech above and substitute “human” for “machine.”
Now explain why anyone gets excited about the possibility of destroying the notion of a soul. Do you really want to live in a world where everyone thinks of humans as just complicated machines?
Unfortunately, even if (well, technically even though) the soul exists, we may still enter this nightmarish world. If people come to believe that there is no soul, nothing that make humans uniquely important, then it is hard to see how we avoid the problem Budrys sketches out in this philosophical tract masquerading as a science fiction novel.
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