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Man in a Cage

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Harker Lee is a survivor. His mind has withstood the threat of insanity and the pressure of imprisonment. His lifelong struggle to keep mind and body together in the face of the hostile environment of the maximum-security block has been a struggle against the society of his fellow men. But that society can still find a need for him a need for the ability to survive which it has tested to the full. He had been taken from his cell once, to be used in experiments in reading minds. Now he is brought forth again, to endure the ultimate test: to fly a Titan spaceship through hyperspace to the stars.

Starflight destroys the minds of sane men. But Harker Lee is not sane and his mind has a strength which sane men lack. In Harker Lee, the man whom society has caged for his crimes, now lies the hope that man might break out of the greatest of all cages the void of empty darkness which enfolds the Earth.

In this chilling, enthralling novel of psychology and science fiction, one final escape must be made, for a man and for mankind.

Cover illustration by Guy Billot, design by Judith Woracek.

Published in 1976 by The John Day Company.
ISBN:0-381-98280-7

Published by E-Rights/E-Reads Ltd on 1st March 2003
ISBN: 0759247684

Translated into German as:
Selbsmord im All.

"Neither CRADLE OF THE SUN nor THE BLIND WORM is a transfiguration of ancient mythology, but MAN IN A CAGE has echoes of the labours of Hercules (which is why the central character is named Harker Lee). " - Brian Stableford.

Review by Ian Braidwood

Cast of Characters:
Harker Lee, Mike Sobieski, Jenny Segal, Colonel Henneker, Major Chalk.

This is a difficult book, not to read - you glide through the pages easily enough - but to know what you've come away with at the end.

Harker Lee is an inmate in a top security mental institution where even the guards have a significantly raised rate of suicide. He is plucked from there to take part in the Titan project, which aims to take Man to the stars. The logic is that since the only man to come back alive came back insane, then perhaps a basket case will be up to the job.

Ten years ago, when a younger version of me read Man in a Cage, I convinced myself that Harker Lee never actually got into space. That is because Titan Nine isn't space travel Hooded Swan style, it's much more like being strapped into a Mercury capsule; except that the flight lasts weeks instead of hours. Also, the Mercury astronauts had things to do, whereas Lee was sedated and much of his flight is described in terms of vivid hallucinations. You might think that enough to do for any honest man's sanity, but no, it appears there's something intrinsically hostile about hyperspace.

The main thrust of Man in a Cage is psychological, entailing a deep examination of Harker Lee's schizophrenia, which Brian does from the inside. Much of the of the text is actually directed at the personality which Lee projects to the world and which he refers to as you, so in effect the reader becomes the public face of Harker Lee.

Reading Hooded Swan won't prepare you for this book; it's far more reminiscent of Silverberg's Shadrach in the Furnace or The Second Trip, in that it's a deeply psychological story.

This is Brian at his most experimental and ambitious.

The Brian Stableford Website