Essay Questions

What are the ethical dilemmas within this novel?

The dilemma in the novel is whether or not Neumann is acting ethically in using himself as a scientific experiment, and whether Better Futures as a company is acting unethically in standing by and watching, and in many ways encouraging, the slow descent into madness of a brilliant mind.

Neumann is an experimental engineer and cybernetics expert. He has fixed ideas of what he wants to develop and achieve, but the only person he ever experiments upon is himself. What prevents this novel from becoming a horror novel and maintains its science fiction, thriller genre, is that he amputates his own limbs, not anybody else's.

However, Better Futures are arguably extremely unethical in their encouragement of Neumann's self-alteration and his amputation of his limbs in order to further the development of prosthetic limbs. The problem with their research is that they are doing it at the expense of a man who is clearly descending into some kind of madness, and they are developing what are essentially robotic soldiers, creating a human who is more robot than human.

The Manager is never given a name in the novel. Why do you think this is?

The Manager is the symbolic "the man" - or "the woman" - for whom we are said to be working, yet we never meet them or find out who they really are. This is the point of the Manager in the novel. The Manager is a nameless, faceless position of power, They are not attached emotionally in any way to any of the staff that work under them, or even to Neumann, the one man who is at the forefront of the experimental engineering. The Manager is a set of instructions, a strategy, a set of objectives, that will be carried out no matter who is currently holding the position of the Manager.