The Man Who Melted

By Jack Dann and Robert Silverberg

The Man Who Melted is a warning for the future. It is the Brave New World and 1984 for our time, for it gives us a glimpse into our own future — a future ruled by corporations that control deadly and powerful forms of mass manipulation. It is a prediction of what could happen...tomorrow. The Man Who Melted examines how technology affects us and changes our morality, and it questions how we might remain human in an inhuman world. Will the future disenfranchise or empower the individual? Here you'll find new forms of sexuality, new perversions, new epiphanies, and an entirely new form of consciousness.

Would you pay to "go down" with the Titanic?

In this dystopia the Titanic is brought back from the bottom of the sea and refurbished, only to be sunk again for those who want the ultimate decadent experience. Some passengers pay to commit suicide by "going under" with the ship.

The Man Who Melted has been called "one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time" by Science Fiction Age and is considered a genre classic. It is the stunning odyssey of a man searching through the glittering, apocalyptic landscape of the next century for a woman lost to him in a worldwide outbreak of telepathic fear. Here is a terrifying future where people can gamble away their hearts (and other organs) and telepathically taste the last flickering thoughts of the dead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 4, 2010
• ISBN: 9781615925087

Jack Dann

Jack Dann is a multiple award winning author who has written or edited over 60 books, including the groundbreaking novels Junction, Starhiker, The Man Who Melted, The Memory Cathedral -- which is an international bestseller, the Civil War novel The Silent, and Bad Medicine, which has been compared to the works of Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson and called "the best road novel since the Easy Rider days." Dann's work has been compared to Jorge Luis Borges, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, Castaneda, J. G. Ballard, Mark Twain, and Philip K. Dick. Philip K. Dick, author of the stories from which the films Blade Runner and Total Recall were made, wrote that "Junction is where Ursula Le Guin's Lathe of Heaven and Tony Boucher's 'The Quest for Saint Aquin' meet...and yet it's an entirely new novel.... I may very well be basing some of my future work on Junction." Best-selling author Marion Zimmer Bradley called Starhiker "a superb book... it will not give up all its delights, all its perfections, on one reading." Library Journal has called Dann "...a true poet who can create pictures with a few perfect words." Roger Zelazny thought he was a reality magician and Best Sellers has said that "Jack Dann is a mind-warlock whose magicks will confound, disorient, shock, and delight." The Washington Post Book World compared his novel The Man Who Melted with Ingmar Bergman's film The Seventh Seal. His short stories have appeared in Omni and Playboy and other major magazines and anthologies. He is the editor of the anthology Wandering Stars, one of the most acclaimed American anthologies of the 1970's, and several other well-known anthologies such as More Wandering Stars. Wandering Stars and More Wandering Stars have just been reprinted in the U.S. Dann also edits the multi-volume Magic Tales series with Gardner Dozois and is a consulting editor TOR Books. He is a recipient of the Nebula Award, the Australian Aurealis Award (twice), the Ditmar Award (three times), the World Fantasy Award, and the Premios Gilgamés de Narrativa Fantastica award. Dann has also been honoured by the Mark Twain Society (Esteemed Knight). High Steel, a novel co-authored with Jack C. Haldeman II, was published in 1993. Critic John Clute called it "a predator...a cat with blazing eyes gorging on the good meat of genre. It is most highly recommended." A sequel entitled Ghost Dance is in progress. Dann's major historical novel about Leonardo da Vinci -- entitled The Memory Cathedral -- was first published in December 1995 to rave reviews. It has been published in 10 languages to date. It won the Australian Aurealis Award in 1997, was #1 on The Age bestseller list, and a story based on the novel was awarded the Nebula Award. The Memory Cathedral was also shortlisted for the Audio Book of the Year, which was part of the 1998 Braille & Talking Book Library Awards. Morgan Llwelyn called The Memory Cathedral "a book to cherish, a validation of the novelist's art and fully worthy of its extraordinary subject." The San Francisco Chronicle called it "a grand accomplishment," Kirkus Reviews thought it was "An impressive accomplishment," and True Review said, "Read this important novel, be challenged by it; you literally haven't seen anything like it." Dann's next novel The Silent was chosen by Library Journal as one of their 'Hot Picks.' Library Journal wrote: "This is narrative storytelling at its best -- so highly charged emotionally as to constitute a kind of poetry from hell. Most emphatically recommended." Auhor Peter Straub said, "This tale of America's greatest trauma is full of mystery, wonder, and the kind of narrative inventiveness that makes other novelists want to hide under the bed." And The Australian called it "an extraordinary achievement." His contemporary road novel Bad Medicine (titled Counting Coup in the U.S.) has been called "a vivid and compelling vision-quest through the dark back roads and blue highways of the American soul." Dann is also the co-editor (with Janeen Webb) of the groundbreaking Australian anthology Dreaming Down-Under, which Peter Goldsworthy has called "the biggest, boldest, most controversial collection of original fiction ever published in Australia." It has won Australia's Ditmar Award and is the first Australian book ever to win the prestigious World Fantasy Award. Dann is also the author of the retrospective short story collection Jubilee: the Essential Jack Dann. The West Australian said it was "Sometimes frightening, sometimes funny, erudite, inventive, beautifully written and always intriguing. Jubilee is a celebration of the talent of a remarkable storyteller." As part of its Bibliographies of Modern Authors Series, The Borgo Press has published an annotated bibliography and guide entitled The Work of Jack Dann. An updated second edition is in progress. Dann is also listed in Contemporary Authors and the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series; The International Authors and Writers Who's Who; Personalities of America; Men of Achievement; Who's Who in Writers, Editors, and Poets, United States and Canada; Dictionary of International Biography; the Directory of Distinguished Americans; Outstanding Writers of the 20th Century; and Who's Who in the World. Dann commutes between Melbourne and a farm overlooking the sea. He also 'commutes' back and forth to Los Angeles and New York.

Reviews for The Man Who Melted

[jasonpettus · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)Science-fiction trilogies are notoriously tricky things, precisely because of their dual nature: they only succeed when telling a unified uber-story that effortlessly flows from one book to the next, yet each of those novels need to be decent standalone books as well, in that it's so infinitely easier to simply stop reading a trilogy after book one than to put down a thousand-page single volume 300 pages in. And indeed, for three years now, the jury's been out as far as the fate of David Louis Edelman's "Jump 225" trilogy, his fiction debut whose first volume, 2007's Infoquake, garnered him a surprise Campbell Award nomination, a trilogy I have a soft spot for because of Infoquake being one of the first books I ever reviewed here; as I mentioned for example in my write-up of volume two, 2008's MultiReal, the three-book arc seemed to be treading on decent if not traditional ground, although with none of us able to say how it would end up until seeing volume three, this year's Geosynchron, for ourselves. But now that I finally have read that concluding title, I'm happy to say that things end with a rather literal bang, with Edelman turning in a book that nicely answers all lingering questions from his expansive universe, yet stands alone as a much better volume than either of the first two; and this is always such a great thing to see, after watching so many other SF trilogies end on a whimper instead.Those who are interested might want to first read the 500-word summary of the Jump 225 universe I did for my review of the original Infoquake; but in a nutshell, our story takes place at least several hundred years after our own times, a future history which includes an apocalyptic war against sentient machines that decimated billions of humans, then a "Second Dark Age" when nearly all technology was banned, and the world's survivors ruled by oppressive nation-sized religious/military organizations. This then eventually led to a second Renaissance (or "The Reawakening" as it's known to them), in which the old theories behind both democratic checks and balances and dot-com-era capitalist entrepreneurialism were re-discovered, and suddenly worshipped as passionately as the citizens of the Enlightenment worshipped the ideas of the ancient Greeks; and the whole reason this era of humanity got kick-started in the first place was because of the legendary Surina family, inventors of a three-pronged system called Bio/logics, in which millions of nanobots are introduced to a human body then programmed with a whole series of free-market applications for making that body work better (everything from apps regulating heart rates to ones that change eye color), ushering in a whole new period of scientific advances, eventually leading to such miracles as five-sense virtual remote traveling, high-speed maglev lines now circling the globe, and even honest-to-God teleportation, even if it's so expensive that hardly anyone can afford to use it.Edelman's trilogy itself, then, tells the story of one of these entrepreneurial nanobot programmers, a charming assh-le named Natch (think Jason Calacanis except thinner and better-looking, not a surprising comparison because of the author's background in web entrepreneurialism himself); the actual storyline first follows the saga of Natch and his team rising to the top of the Bio/logics market, which then brings him to the attention of the latest member of the Surina bloodline, who like all her ancestors has come up with her own invention for changing the course of humanity, a system of programs that supposedly manipulate these inner-body nanobots into literally predicting the future. (And in fact this is the weakest part of the entire trilogy, the fact that this "MultiReal" technology doesn't hold up to even a moderate amount of reader scrutiny; for example, if playing a game of tennis, these programs are supposed to be able to cycle through the millions of choices available to your opponent during any particular microsecond of their latest racket swing, determine which will most likely happen, then automatically direct the nanobots in your own body to perform the exact most perfect countermove faster than you can even consciously think, a cool idea but that becomes riddled with problems once you start thinking about it in any level of detail.) The second volume of the trilogy, then, is mostly about the myriad of issues that surround this MultiReal technology -- how safe it is, how to best introduce it to humanity, how to best keep it out of the hands of their competitors, and how this may or may not relate to the growing number of massive psychic "infoquakes" the human race has been experiencing more and more. (And please know that there are dozens of other inventive details regarding Edelman's universe that I'm leaving out for the sake of brevity, including the "pharisees" of southeast Asia who don't believe in using Bio/logics, the various philosophy-based nation-states that have largely supplanted governmental organizations, the constant state of cold war they are all in as a result, and lots more.)The good news, though, is that Geosynchron largely ignores most of the smaller details from the first two books, in order to examine the much trippier story of what happens to Natch as the first private beta-tester of this MultiReal system; and this is a blessing, frankly, in that Edelman had by the end of volume two already exhausted most of the possibilities inherent in this "wetware dot-com age of the future" milieu he created for the trilogy's beginning, and also in that I was finding myself even then growing increasingly annoyed at the cutesy, instantly dated "CyberThis, CyberThat" terms he had invented for every little thing going on. Thankfully, Edelman seemed to understand as well that such elements had been almost completely played out, so takes the story in volume three in a much grander direction, really delving into the sociological issues that would come with a technology like this, examining what such a thing would really mean in practical terms for the very future of the human race, and whether such a thing could be legitimately called an evolutionary shortcut. And in the meanwhile, Edelman really pushes himself linguistically as well, using the side effects of this experimental technology as an excuse to tell Natch's story in a non-linear fashion, with the scenes that take place in his head jumping instantly from childhood to adulthood and back again, the author finally displaying the kind of maturity in his personal style that I had been publicly hoping for during the first two volumes.It all adds up by the end to a rather remarkable thing, a final volume that is far and away better than the two that came before it; and like I said, this is unusual and welcome for a SF trilogy, in that most trilogies of note tend to have a spectacular first volume instead (which of course is why they got noticed in the first place), with returns then more and more diminishing with each subsequent title. Now that I've read the entire thing myself, I can confidently state that the "Jump 225" trilogy is one that new readers can look forward to getting better and better as it continues, and is I think a good sign that Edelman has a long career still ahead of him, after this fluke-like debut that garnered him so much attention so quickly. The entire trilogy comes highly recommended today, and especially this spectacular ending to it all.Out of 10: 8.9, or 9.5 for science-fiction fans

[vvolodymyr_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Geosynchron is overall a good conclusion to the Jump 225 trilogy.As with previous volumes, the author's style is very readable, and the science/tech very sketchy.Unfortunately, as a consequence of the plot development, we don't see that interesting business side of things, which was a welcome feature in previous volumes. Instead we see more action, and more importantly, — nice, different new locations, and that really helped to liven up the story.A little more of a wider world, society, people's way of life could be seen here, - that the last parts really lacked.I do feel, though, that the long awaited, slowly built-up-to conclusion lacked the UMPF I really expected.In the end, I really do hope that Mr. Edelman continues writing scifi, taking reviewers' notes into consideration, of course :)

[kevinjoseph_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Every once in a great while I run across an author who has imagined a world so vivid and complete that I feel as if it actually exists. When that world is set hundreds of years in the future, this feat of creation is even more astounding.Geosynchron, the final piece of David Edelman's Jump 225 Trilogy, completes the story of entrepreneur Natch, convincingly portraying his evolution from self-centered businessman to socially-conscious guardian of MultiReal. Infected with life-threatening black code and on the run from his nemesis Brone as well two executives vying for control of the Government, Natch must choose between two paths, each with dire consequences for the welfare of the human race.As with its predecessors, this novel features intense action sequences, mentally-stimulating political maneuvering, and interesting thematic material. Here, the possible unification of the connectibles (the majority of the population who fully embrace the fusion of their bodies with software that regulats their bodily functions and connects them to the Datasea) and the unconnectibles (a minority group who have chosen to remain in a more-or-less natural state), and the disparate viewpoints they embrace, form a central motif.If humans are on an inevitable path towards perfection, is it truly possible to destroy a technology that has the possibility to improve the human condition (but with alarming collateral consequences) or can we only hope to come up with a way to restrict its proliferation until adequate controls are in place? This is not only Natch's dilemma, but the dilemma our society faces as we stand on the brink of technologies that could alter the course of human evolution.The Jump 225 Trilogy, for me, deserves not only a wide readership but also recognition as one of the most important sci-fi works of our time.