The Artificial Man by L. P. Davies

Followers of my twitter feed may recall that on December 22 of 2021 I was in Washington, D.C.--the belly of the beast!--where, when I wasn't fending off wretched beggars, I was browsing the outdoor sale carts at Second Story Books.  Among the noteworthy books on the carts this last visit was a hardcover copy of L. P. Davies's The Artificial Man.  Seeing this specimen in the wild reminded me that I owned a paperback copy of The Artificial Man and prompted me to read the novel, which was first published in England in 1965 and in America in 1967.  My paperback copy was produced by Scholastic Book Services in 1968...wait, Scholastic?  The publisher of Clifford the Big Red Dog and the Magic School Bus?  Does that mean there is not going to be any sex in this book?

The Artificial Man in some ways is like an A. E. van Vogt story, in that over the course of the novel we and the characters learn astonishing truths about the world and how it is run from behind the scenes by competing cabals of superior people, and that as the novel progresses a guy develops super powers with which he is able to trigger a paradigm shift, offering us readers something like a sense of wonder ending in which we realize that the future offers a fantastic array of mind-blowing possibilities.  Davies's novel also has some of the elements of a mystery novel and a conspiracy novel, in that there are a limited number of characters stuck in a confined area and most of them turn out to have secret identities, unspoken allegiances and covert motives that are hidden, then revealed, and then change as the story proceeds.  The Artificial Man also lightly touches on questions of politics that we often see in SF--will future governments be bigger and more intrusive, how much so, and why, and should we welcome or deplore such government expansion?

This all sounds fine, and The Artificial Man is a competently wrought novel, but I didn't enjoy it very much--I'm judging this one, like so many works of fiction that have come under my eye before it, merely acceptable.  The plot is serviceable, but the style, setting and characters are bland and inspire no emotion, and neither the action scenes nor the relationships between the characters generate any excitement.  There are plenty of little mysteries that are presented and then later solved--e.g., we wonder who among the small cast of characters shot at somebody and with what weapon, and later find out--and many times we find that what we were initially lead to believe about a character is false, but none of these twists and turns registered emotionally with me.

Alright, time for the tedious plot summary.  Alan Fraser is a science fiction writer n the 1960s who lives in a tiny isolated English village that is surrounded by hills; the entire novel takes place in this dull as dishwater location.  Fraser never leaves the village, apparently for medical reasons, he having been in a car accident ten years ago that killed his parents and left him seriously injured, though today he is, outwardly, fully recovered.  He only ever speaks to a few people, among them the housekeeper who administers to him pills everyday as well as doing the cooking and cleaning; his next door neighbor Lee, a sculptor who comes by multiple times a day to shoot the breeze; Dr. Crowther, who comes by for regular visits to give him his injections; a handful of village residents like the constable, the guy who manages the post office and the telephone switchboard, the shopkeeper and a retired military man; and the guy who drives into the village every day to deliver goods to the store.  In the early chapters of the story Alan notices odd phenomena, like when that delivery truck passes him and goes down a dead end street, but never reappears, even though it can't leave the village without coming back the way it came.  Lee and Crowther try to get him to dismiss this and similar mysterious incidents as simple confusion, or the result of one of the blackouts to which he is subject, and urge him to get back to work on his writing.

Alan receives some mysterious phone calls and gets the feeling that his neighbors are working together to make sure he is never alone, and rebelliously strikes off for the woods, where, apparently by chance, he meets a pretty girl who is on a hike.  When he returns to the village he collapses, apparently shot, but not fatally, by some kind of energy weapon.

Davies doesn't limit our view to that of Alan--there are as many--maybe more--scenes starring the other characters, and so we don't learn things along with Alan and share his bewilderment and surprise, but instead often learn things before or after he does.  

By page 100 of the 255-page book, in scenes in which Lee and Crowther talk with each other (testily, they being from different departments) and then interrogate and induct that young woman, Karen Summer, into their conspiracy, we have learned the basics of what is really going on.  It is not 1966, but 2016, and the British Commonwealth is a totalitarian socialist society in which the government controls all the media and compels you to watch propaganda TV broadcasts, tells you what job you will have, and can even reprogram your brain if you misbehave.  This dolorous development is ostensibly a response to overpopulation, a ruthless police state being required to ration food and housing and manage a system of mandatory birth control and eugenic selection of the few deemed worthy to reproduce.  Karen Summer, after a few years working as a nurse, was assigned to work at a collectivized farm nearby; as a child she was familiar with the village now controlled by Crowther and Lee and her chance meeting with Alan Fraser occurred when she sneaked away from the farm on a day off to revisit her childhood haunt.

The British Commonwealth is part of a Western Alliance that is embroiled in a cold war with Communist China, which has conquered lots of additional territory--it is implied that these conquests include India and Japan.  (The Soviet Union and its satellites are neutral.)  "Alan Fraser" was born Hagan Arnold in Australia; he had one Polynesian grandparent and was raised by a Chinese family and so was familiar with Asian culture and fluent in the Cantonese language.  The government selected Arnold to be a spy behind enemy lines, and after much training in England spent nine months in Red China.  He discovered something very important, something he couldn't describe in a mere message, so he was extracted from Asia, but on his way back to Britain the aircraft in which he was a passenger crashed; he survived, but the pain of his injuries triggered a post-hypnotic suggestion in his mind that made him forget all he knew, a bit of programming installed in Arnold to ensure he couldn't reveal anything to the Chinese should he be tortured.  Crowther and Lee have constructed the fake 1966 identity of Alan Fraser and the fake village with the object of jogging Arnold's memory and resurfacing what he discovered in China--their hope is that when Alan writes SF stories (which they have been nudging him to set in 2016 in a West vs China cold war environment) his subconscious will insert into their plots the perhaps vital intelligence Arnold uncovered on his mission.

After this big revelation much of the remaining 150 or so pages of the book concerns the tension between Lee--a big wig in the executive branch security services of the totalitarian government--and Crowther--a top scientist and leader in the second-most powerful department in the government, the medical/psychological apparatus that tinkers with peoples' brains--and their struggle to keep the operation going despite the efforts of one traitor in the village to disrupt the experiment by calling "Alan Fraser" on the phone and deprogramming the former spy and the efforts of another traitor to just shoot him dead with a laser gun.  Parallel to these plot threads is the reemergence of the Hagan Arnold personality under the influence of those phone calls and Karen's inadvertent promptings.  Arnold/Fraser starts exhibiting all kinds of awesome skills, at first super reflexes and keen senses of hearing and sight, and eventually telepathy and telekinesis--these skills help him survive attacks from the assassin and to loosen Lee and Crowther's grip on him.  

After being coerced into joining the Crowther/Lee operation, Karen is approached by the traitor who has been making those phone calls--this guy was a partner of Arnold's when they were in the spy service together.  He tells Karen that he and Arnold are individualists who are against the current tyrannical British government; though he didn't live during them, Arnold saw the 1960s as a golden age of freedom.  This rebel claims that Crowther and Lee have filled Arnold's noggin with the Fraser identity not just to retrieve info on China, but also to neutralize Arnold as a threat to the totalitarian government and to use him as a guinea pig for new psychological methods that can turn everyone in the British Commonwealth into a willing slave of the government.

Near the end of the novel we learn more about Crowther's plans, some of which contradicts the rebel's suspicions.  While Lee is chummy with the current dictator, Crowther wants to overthrow him in a coup, and under Lee's nose he has been changing Arnold's brain to not only create the Fraser personality but to stimulate those mental powers we mentioned so he will have the needed abilities to take over the country--Crowther thinks he will be able to control Arnold via drugs and hypnosis and direct him to rule in ways Crowther sees fit.  But Arnold becomes super powerful more quickly than Crowther anticipated; Arnold/Fraser's physique even goes through a radical change, developing into the kind of big-headed tiny-bodied form we often see in classic SF stories about the future evolution of humanity.

When he finally realizes Crowther is up to something, Lee calls to London for help, and a squadron of attack helicopters arrives along with the dictator of Britain himself!  Arnold/Fraser uses his telekinesis to severely injure the dictator and fake his own death, and contrives with the aid of Crowther to have his now-super brain put into the dictator's body.  Now Arnold/Fraser is in charge of the British Commonwealth, just as the rebel and Crowther might have hoped!  But he doesn't seem to share the rebel's commitment to British liberty and he certainly is not under control of Dr. Crowther...in fact, like the guy who evolved into a super brain in Edmond Hamilton's 1931 story "The Man Who Evolved," it looks like acquiring super power has made Arnold/Fraser contemptuous of us normal humans--he may well be an even more cruel dictator than was the man whose body he now occupies!

There is nothing egregious about The Artificial Man (though you wokesters will object to how so many of the male characters--determined men of action--dismiss women as mere impediments, as well as the characterization of Asians in the novel as a bunch of obedient kamikaze types) but there is nothing really fun or fascinating about it, either.  While set in a totalitarian world beset by overpopulation, it portrays life in such a milieu not at all, but instead confines itself to a boring little village.  Most of its main characters are secret agents or security personnel, but the scenes about espionage and assassination arouse no thrills, and the whole novel suffers from a slow deliberate pace.  I'm afraid I won't be seeking out any other books by L. P. Davies.