MAN IN A CAGE

The premise isn't new: faster-than-light travel has been achieved, but for some bizarre reason it drives men mad--hence the last desperate gamble of sending a madman into hyperspace. What Stableford does with it is an unexpected tour de force of structure and insight. The schizophrenic Harker Lee tells his own story from three stroboscopically revolving perspectives: the prison notebooks of ruminations on the maximum-security ward for homicidal maniacs which has been his world for some ten years; a roughly factual account of his conscription into Project Titan; and a sequence of fantasy-experiences by turn bleak, lyrical and apocalytpic, corresponding to Harker's progress between Earth and Proxima Centauri. Stableford remains amazingly in control of his disparate materials; he invests that modish gimmick, the schizophrenic's challenge to the ""sane,"" with terrifying conviction and uncanny fineness of detail. Science fiction if you will, but the vastest spaces here are inner.