SF. Oh give me a home, where the cyborgs do roam, and the grid is not silent all day! It's 2043 and Mars has been colonized by earthlings. They live underground in domed cities run by a computer system known as the grid, and the circuitry is getting a little tired of the humans thinking they know best. The pov jumps between several one-dimensional characters and the plot hinges on an abstract threat we're told about but never actually encounter. The "threat" is all hat and no cattle and is easily dispatched with a simple promise. Normally I enjoy Pohl's science fiction, but this lacked his usual attention to world building and the other. I blame his cowriter. There was also some tacky sex. However, the alert readers at Amazon inform me that this was the sequel to Pohl's Man Plus, which has to be better than this.Two stars because even though it was sort of bad, it still had cyborgs in it.
Disappointing sequel to the masterful "Man Plus" story; pretty much completely missing all of the admirable qualities of its predecessor. Honestly, I'd be happier if Pohl hadn't put his name on this and let his writing partner take full credit - it feels like he had almost no influence on this at all. The ending is just flat out disappointing and not a terribly logical conclusion to this story, much less finishing out the preceding tale. Not quite as horrendous as the capper for the recent Battlestar Galactica remake, but it's in the same ballpark, for sure.
