Customer Reviews

The Man Who Melted

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

In a country that is falling apart through economic stratification, the pressures build into outbreaks of telepathic ability and rioting mobs converge after this happens. Retaliation is military.

Amidst all this, those with money do as they have usually done, and a man is obsessed with finding a woman that he had a past relationship with. This gives him problems relating to those currently around him.

The book incorporates variations of 'Blind Shemmy' and 'Going Under', in one of his former menage-a-trois lovers going organ gambling, and then trying to duck those after him by disappearing on a Titanic voyage.

This novel is an overlooked and underappreciated classic of science fiction. Every sciecne fiction fan should read this book. The tale is about one man's odyssey acros a post-apoclyptic landscape of the near-future. Sounds like standard fare. This rendering of a science fiction staple far surpasses many others. The nightmare landscape is truly surreal in all the definitions of the word. In The Man Who Melted Jack Dann shows talent that raises him far above the editorial responsibilities he was later to embark upon. Find it any way that you can.

Artist Raymond Mantle is in France searching for his vanished wife Josiane, who disappeared during the first wave of the psychic Great Scream. Raymond does not miss his spouse as he has a lover, Joan, but hopes by finding her he can take back the crater sized gaps in his memory tied to her existence with him, apparently stolen from him by her during the Great Scream. All he has is videos of them together left behind when she became a Screamer channeling visions that turn into deadly realities as the world no longer has physical meaning or spiritual connection.

Raymond follows a clue that takes him to the Crying Church where he plans to hook into the mind of a dying Screamer to determine whether Josiane has stepped to the other side. As he does that with Joan looking more and more like his 3d videos of Josiane, Raymond begins to see the "dark spaces" of the minds of those dead and becoming telepathically connected to Joan and a friend Pfeiffer as reality twists in the winds of his mind while which sanity is blown away.

This is a reprint of a dark science fiction thriller starring an unlikable hero who garners audience empathy due to his plight anyway. The story line grips readers who wonder what Raymond is finding out about truth, ultimate reality and the essence of being in a world where hooking in can mean losing one's mind. Fans who appreciate a cerebral thought provoking tale will want to read this character driven surreal novel that challenges basic acceptable concepts starting with I think therefore am I going deeper into what makes a person.

Sure this book was a Nebula award nominee back in 1985, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a timeless classic that's dying to be rediscovered. Other reviewers are focusing on this book's main premise of surreal and horrifying psychic landscapes, but these folks may have only read the publisher's description and its attempt to push what's more-or-less unique about the story. But when you try to digest the entire book you'll find that Jack Dann indeed created a unique premise but wasted it on an uninspiring tale of personal relationships amongst characters that are not even remotely likeable (or in some cases, not even remotely believable). The nightmare psychic journeys only appear sporadically and actually contribute little to the story, when they should be the story's main focus.

Granted, the backdrop is pretty cool, as some sort of psychic mutation is spreading around the world and sucking the population into an unhinged collective psychosis. This idea has real potential, except Jack Dann barely describes how this psychic menace works (especially how it makes everyone telepathic) and the resulting social chaos is very implausibly constructed. Instead, Dann uses the premise for telepathic mind games amongst incestuous and unfaithful lovers, with unrewarding explorations of messy relationships and a lot of downright ugly sexual innuendo. Meanwhile, having the story's semi-climax take place on a reenactment of the Titanic disaster is a completely ridiculous contrivance, after which the tiresome interpersonal politics continue to a conclusion in which the social chaos of the book's premise suddenly pops up out of nowhere again, as if Dann had forgotten about it and figured that he should throw it in one more time. This book starts out with a great idea, but that idea is not utilized to anywhere near its potential and is wasted on completely unappealing characters and their tiresome personal struggles. This book could have been a timeless classic if its great premise hadn't gone nowhere fast. [~doomsdayer520~]

A must read for all science fiction fans this book is a view of a post-atomic world 200 years in the future. Popular cities of today have become the catacombs of a new civilization of telepathic humans where ones inner most thoughts are no longer their own. The book centers around the relationship of 3 individuals and the search by one to find his missing memory.