Cyteen
Hugo winner (1989) and a regular pick for the best SF novel about cloning ever written; its psychogenesis arguments anticipate decades of behavioural-genetics debate.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Man Plus about?
To survive on Mars unprotected, astronaut Roger Torraway must become something that can: eyes replaced with faceted crystal, skin with polymer, lungs with machinery, until the question of where the man ends and the project begins stops having an answer. Pohl narrates the surgical unmaking of a human being with clinical tenderness, alongside the collapse of Torraway's marriage and an Earth sliding towards war — and a final-page reveal about the narrator that re-frames the entire novel. Cyborg fiction's most humane and most unnerving classic.
Why it matters
Nebula winner (1976). The definitive cyborg novel, anticipating transhumanist debates by decades.
Read next
Exhalation
Multiple Hugo and Locus wins among its contents; the title story in particular — entropy as first-person elegy — is already standard anthology canon.
Forever Peace
Hugo, Nebula and Campbell Memorial winner — one of the rare books to take all three; its remote-warfare and forced-empathy arguments only grow more current.