The Spare Man

Abstract

The Spare Man takes place aboard a cruise ship on its way to Mars. In this ship are travelling Tesla Crane and her husband Shal, as well as Tesla’s service dog Gimlet. Tesla is a robotics engineer who has retired due to a laboratory accident that rendered her with some disabilities. She has a Deep Brain Pain Suppressor installed, which works like a Deep Brain Stimulator, to handle the recurrent pain caused by the accident. Gimlet is a robot service dog that is made to look like an actual dog and trained to help Tesla with her PTSD. While the novel explores a murder mystery that Tesla is trying to solve after her husband is erroneously arrested, the narrative addresses the usefulness of robotics in enhancing human capacities and curtailing potential disabilities in people. In addition, The Spare Man also broaches some of the particulars of space travel, specifically the time lag in the communications between Earth and the ship, which increases as the cruise moves further away from the Earth and approaches Mars. As Tesla tries to reach her lawyer Fantine, on Earth, by the end of the novel, the delay in communication was around twenty minutes.