The Man in the Maze

A quick good read of a classic story revisited. Any fans of silverberg will enjoy this book.

Dick Muller was a hero... that is, until an encounter with an alien race left him unable to be tolerated in a human's prescence. When the human race rejected him, he left...to a planet with a giant maze on it. No one has ever reached the center of the maze. Now the human race needs Dick Muller to save the planet but first they must find him and convince him to come back and save the race that sent him into exile. This book is great. My favorite book of all time. I highly recommend it to everyone!

Mankind is threatened by an alien that strips us of our free will. We can't communicate with these aliens, so we can't fight or appease them. Our only hope is Dick Muller, who, in mankind's first contact with an alien race, was permanently maimed and cannot live with humans anymore. However, it is precisely this injury that gives him the opportunity to let the aliens know we are a thinking race. The only question is-will he reject the human race that previously rejected him? This modern retelling of the myth of Philoctetes is short, sweet, and to the point. It doesn't pause for discursive considerations of the maning of life or the nature of the human beast; that would belabor a subtle point and lose the larger meaning. The whole piece is a careful consideration of the limits of the human animal, and what makes it possible to live with one another. This silver-age SF gem presaged such Silverberg classics as Dying Inside, a more careful meditation on the same themes. It also dovetails neatly into the New Wave of science fiction, in which the great source of speculation isn't scientific advancement, but the limits of the human being. All in all, it becomes a forward-thinking insight using a framework as old as time. Though imperfect, it belongs to a class of book that just doesn't get written anymore.

it is some 18 years since I heard this book broadcast as a series on "Morning Book Reading" on ABC Radio back in the days when it was heard at 9a.m. it has remained fresh in my mind ever since, it is an enthralling tale which kept me listening day after day and waiting for the next episode. It always struck me as being an ideal book to be turned into a film but, as far as I know it hasnt been-yet!The tale involves an astronaut who has been 'infected' by aliens in a manner which makes it impossible for anybody to be close to him without feeling psychological pain. Taking himself off to an uninhabited planet which has been arranged into a deadly maze by previous aliens, he defeats the maze and lives comfortably, on his own - until Earth needs him.An expedition is sent out to bring him back and the book deals with the efforts of the Earth crew to also beat the maze and make contact. The maze has a whole series of grizzly traps, which keep the reader guessing as to what will be next.The astronaut returns to Earth fixes up the problem and in doing so is 'cured' but prefers to return to his planet instead of remaining on Earth.A super good story. I will be reading it again