Max Barry’s Machine Man is a disarmingly funny and light-feeling novel about an antisocial engineer who decides to create his own prosthetic leg after he loses his own in an industrial accident. Charles Neumann is an antisocial, technology-dependent scientist at a top secret military contractor’s skunkworks. Dissatisfied with the prosthesis he is fitted with after he accidentally crushes his leg in a materials-testing machine, he sets out to create a better leg — a leg that’s so good you’d chop your own off to get it (this is also the battle-cry of the real-world open-source prosthetics movement). Which is precisely what he does. via Boing Boing
October 26, 2011
