I'm a sucker for a weird romance and it doesn't get much weirder than this one. Max Berry is a master of the unexpected love story but they don't always appear in his stories which makes them all the more satisfying when they appear. Berry is really more of a science or speculative fiction satirist. His stories always take some element of society or social trend and twists it. In the case of Machine Man, he's playing with people's obsession with technology and body modification to create a story firmly seated in transhumanist philosophy. The whole idea of it is to used science and technology to become something more than just human. It's not a new idea. The term 'transhuman' was coined in the fifties and I've read several stories and novels that feature it in the plot. Many of those stories are hard to immerse in. While it's an intriguing idea to leave behind messy biology, we do tend to be pretty attached to our bodies. Characters who do so willingly are often hard to relate to.
Charles Neumann is a scientist or an engineer (it's never entirely clear which) who starts thinking about how to improve human functionality after losing a leg in an industrial accident. The (somewhat sinister) company he works for gives him carte blanche to tinker with advanced prosthetics and a massive team to assist. It isn't long before he starts to view the synthetic limbs as superior to the biological ones. It goes from there as one would expect. What's unexpected is the strange little love story that crops up between Charles and his prosthetist, Lola.
The love story is odd for a couple reasons. First, Charles Neumann is incredibly detached about his biological body and ridiculously cut off from other people. It's amazing that Berry gets us to connect with him in the first place and it's quite the feat that he makes it believable that he would fall in love at all. Second, Lola is perhaps an even stranger character. At first, she doesn't seem all that odd. She's a softer, more emotional character. It's tempting to see her as hapless or swept along by Charles, but in reality, it's pretty clear that she knows what he's up to pretty early in the story. She's not swept along, she's a willing, even eager, participant in Charles schemes.
It all should be a little horrifying, and it is on some level, but there is also something sweet and tender in the relationship between Charles and Lola. I think the love story humanizes the two characters and helps us relate to two otherwise alien characters.
I greatly enjoyed the read. I always marvel at Berry's characters.