From the cover blurb:
Earth's elite -- or its oucasts?For a selected, genetically-fitted few among the teaming millions of the twenty-first century, to become a Messenger for the Hulm Institue is to escape the prison that is life, that is earth.
A Messenger is noble!
A Messenger is one of the chosen.
A Messenger is a forerunner of a time in which fear and disease will disappear for ever.
And inside a Messenger's head is murder, impotence and despair.
Review:
The first Malzberg I ever read, and it certainly holds a special place with me for that reason. This book is extremely satirical. When one considers the premise, Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage immediately comes to mind, but Malzberg handles the material in a vein darker than any Asimov could ever conceive (that’s probably a good thing, since their works inhabit different dimensions, each having their own merits and faults). The future society is definitely interesting, the characters extremely well-developed, the writing graceful and rhythmical and fluid and dark, the conclusion inevitable and yet perfect. I remember there was a time when I committed the first paragraph to memory. Here are the first few lines of the novel, quite representative (I’m still impressed by them today):
"In medias res, folks, here comes Blount. He is on the run and full of fun, looking for a follicle of cancer. Consider him if you will, if you must: his indignity, his power: he is twenty-two years old at this time, still and always-to-be virginal, sliding through corpuscles and strips of intestine like a beetle, scuttling through all of the fields of darkness."
The novel is in fact the splicing together of two Malzberg stories, "In The Pocket" and "The Man in the Pocket" with a new voice. Of these Malzberg's favorite version is "The Man in the Pocket".
I'd give this 9.25/10.