Customer Reviews

The Shrinking Man (The Gregg Press Science Fiction Series)

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

 

 

What can I say. This is one of the great science fiction books of all time. Not only that, it's scarier than anything Stephen King ever wrote and as exciting an adventure story as anything by Patrick O'Brien. You might remember the movie from your childhood days, but the book is far more inventive and thought provoking.

People have often not noticed the significance of the time this was written. This is science fiction, but more importantly it is a social commentary. The shrinking of the protagonist literally is allegorical for the shrinking of the man in the emerging post-War World II corporate climate where men were treated as statistics by their inaccessible superiors rather than as valued producers in the company. The role of man was changing cause a generation of men to feel less than the culture's definition of "a man." Hence, the shrinking.

Understanding this brings a new dimension to Matheson's work. (Matheson, by the way, was a WWII vet experiencing a similar role crisis working for McDonnell Douglas in a job where he felt he actually did nothing, having no contact with the finished product. He was one of the aerospace industry's thousands of new white-collared workers.)

Isaac Asimov's Fantastic Voyage II is a much better treatment of the miniaturization theme, for hard science fiction content and characterization. This story spent too much time inside the main character's dumb, empty head, with his descent into self-pity being far worse than the stress and perils of growing ever smaller. The other characters were flat and uninteresting. Once you tire of the protagonist bemoaning his fate (and you will tire of it) there is little to make you keep reading, except hope for an interesting resolution. Well, forget it, there isn't one. The ending does not follow logically from the rest of the story and provides no resolution.

The story fails as science fiction and mostly fails as horror fiction. Pared down, it would have made a good script for a comic book. It also probably would work as a juvenile book club selection.