Cage a Man

Demu Trilogy #1

by F.M. Busby

Hamlyn, 1979. British paperback edition of this 1973 novel. First book in the "Demu" space opera trilogy. The other books in this series are "The Proud Enemy" (1975) and "End of the Line" (1980).

Genres: Science Fiction

158 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Francis Marion Busby

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._M._B...

Reviews

[Graham P · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first 1/3 of this novel is a hamfisted whirlwind expose of the Ugly American confined and tortured by the alien Demu, crustacean lifeforms that are basically bipedal lobsters with little care for caution. It's bombastic SF bravado as everyman chump, Barton, gets prodded and played with in order to transition to a Demu, but these lobsters want his seed first. But stubborn lughead that Barton is, he reluctantly foregoes any masturbatory pleasures, only to eventually escape in his own sewage. Yes, he escapes with his own shit! On the run, Barton kills a Demu guard, scrapes out its guts, pisses on its shells to clean out the grue, and then dons the bug armor to deviate his way onto a ship. To make it known that he's a serious Ugly American, he kidnaps a Demu child and her politician father (why'd he have to break the kid's arms?), along with a Tilarian female who he happens to have a thing for. But back on Earth, the novel descends into formalities, and asshole Barton suddenly becomes a good guy as he falls deeper in love with the Tilarian female even though she's been transitioned into a bug.

The final 2/3rds are basically a domestic spin-off. Barton wants to surgically change his lady friend into something he can have sex with, and maybe, just maybe, fall into love with, wedding bells and all that domestic jazz on how to appropriate an alien. All while going through psyche exams, teaching pilots the controls, forging plans to attack the Demu on their home territory, and going on a vacation (not to mention, 3 pages of details on an expense report for such a vacation - Busby must have been preoccupied with his own expenses while writing this section).

Sheesh, a letdown for sure, but this mad lil' book is so ridiculous. Here, our shitty hero comforts his alien girlfriend who's having a difficult time trying to figure out her new body:

'"Now look!" he said. "You are on Earth, not on Tilara. You're wearing plastic Earth tits, aren't you?" She looked at him, blankly.

"Tits?"

"Breasts, dammit!" Barton relaxed his grip. Limila nodded slowly.'

Yeah, this is Barton's world, definitely a man's world in 1973 Busbyland, and a uniquely ridiculous one at that. Highly edible gutter trash for devout SF trashoids.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Cage a Man' (1973) would be an undistinguished pulp novel about aliens that threaten the planet if it was not for the remarkable and disturbing tone of the book. It feels like an expression of rage by the author even as the barely suppressed rage of the protagonist drives the story.

Barton is a former Vietnam veteran who, in his early thirties, is kidnapped by aliens (the Demu) and subjected to brutal torture for eight years. He escapes with a Demu space craft and is part of the military-industrial team that works on responding to the expected invasion threat.

The Demu are not so much consciously evil as an ideologically callous race whose idea of 'doing good' is to turn all other species, who they consider animals, into Demu through mutilating surgery and mind control. The Cold War ideological formulation is too obvious to require comment.

Busby was a Second World War veteran though he seems not to have seen direct action and is on the list of those science fiction writers who backed the Vietnam War. Perhaps this book partly channels an anti-communist frustration with the way that war had gone.

Certainly the Demu approach to mind control and torture could be read back to stories of Communist actions againsts POWs in both Korea and Vietnam. There is an interesting tension between the Demu as a sort of substitute alien gook and recognition that they may also be like us.

A child Demu, one of the kidnapped, becomes a symbol of the Demu being able to think in completely different terms and adopt human ideals. Although this is not developed much, it tends to show that a species or people can be separated from its 'bad' ideology.

Be that as it may, the violence perpetrated on the lobster-like Demu by Barton once he is able to do so pulls no punches nor does Busby pull any more punches in describing the Demu methods of torture, the mutilations of prisoners or what is necessary to try and undo them on Earth.

It is a deeply unpleasant book from that perspective, close to being a novel of horror. Busby also does not flinch from scenes of sexual exploitation and violence in which Barton is as complicit as his captors. Even as a reincorporated human, he remains sexually exploitative and callous.

Barton seems partly justified (given what was done to him) but also as having lost his own humanity and becoming ever more like an animal (thus confirming Demu beliefs) in the desperate game of surviving not only the Demu but his subsequent reincorporation into humanity.

When he returns home, the story revolves around his barely suppressible rage and paranoia and how he deals with those around him including the kidnapped Demu brought with him when he hijacked a Demu craft.

How a sort of redemption emerges in a frankly unsatisfactory ending would be a spoiler but let us say that a good if very dark book is trying to crawl out of an average pulp science fiction horror novel even if it never quite succeeds.

There is a great deal of unresolved tension and ambiguity in this novel. This can often be a good thing in art but, in this case, one guesses it is less deliberate and more an expression of the working out of similar tensions and ambiguities in the first novel of its fifty-year old late-blooming author.

[Rob Slaven · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this little gem up rather randomly and the very brief assessment is that it's not bad. The imagery is at times rather graphic and sends needles up ones spine and once it gets ahold of your interest it doesn't bother to let go. Solid novel in two parts. Standard pulpy sci fi from the genre.

[Sol · Rating 1 out of 5]

I remember this book having only one good part, at the beginning when the protagonist was in the cage of the title. The nature of the cage, his captors and his escape would have made for a great short story, but there's a whole novel tacked on here. Nothing else in the book is remotely as interesting as the intro. And apparently this is the first in a trilogy?

Neither was I too impressed by this book's entry in Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials.



The only noteworthy part of this picture are the bumps and depressions that constitute the Demu's genitals, which have a dissonant sort of beauty to them, in the full context of the anatomy of the subject. While the high-level concept of the Demu (humanoids trying to transform all other intelligent species into replicas of themselves) may be interesting, neither this image nor the book it was from measured up to it.

[Wrongleveeeeeeer · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars.

Not going to say too much about Cage a Man; it's fun in a campy, can't-expect-too-much-out-of-it-anyway kind of way, and the nature of the "evil" of the enemy coupled with the body horror aspect, plus the narrator's honesty regarding Barton's motivations, sexual or otherwise, make it unique enough to earn that extra half-star that pushed me from 2 to 3.

I blew through its ~130 pages in about a day. It is not a difficult read, nor should it be. If you're in the mood for some interesting sci-fi from the 70's that you don't have to take too seriously, check it out.

[Joachim Boaz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com...

"F. M. Busby’s Cage a Man (1973) is an exercise in discomfort and disorientation. A case study of the scarring effects of dehumanizing brutality at the hands of very alien aliens and the slow path towards recovery, Cage a Man successfully conveys the former and stumbles [..]"

[Oz · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the treatment of gender here is a little 1970s (intersex aliens mostly gendered by human characters or called "it", masculine-feminine one of the psychiatric evaluation scales the main character fears failing), every aspect of horror works so well, and any questionable aspect feels so in keeping with the characters and world established. My only other problem was that the ending was a little flimsy, but the human aspect of it was done well, acknowledging the main character's genuinely poor mental health while reassuring him that it's not going to get him locked up again.

Aspects I loved include: the main character's developing psychosis treated as something that's actively keeping him alive and never seen as wholly negative (despite the honesty about its problems); gender affirming surgery by a surgeon who gets called out for treating it as creating a woman from a "something" rather than uncovering a woman who was already there; sexual abuse of both male and female characters shown with appropriate horror; killing and then eating raw the aliens who abducted and tortured the main character; and an alien woman repeatedly asserting that her womanhood is inherently linked to her species, so encouraging to be more like a human woman is no better than denying her womanhood at all.

[Snood · Rating 4 out of 5]

I originally bought the sequel to this, intrigued by the crab rave on the cover and the crazy premise, not knowing it was book 2 of a trilogy. As cool as the first book’s covers are, I opted for the full trilogy omnibus since the third never got a stand-alone release.

This book begins just like you’d expect based on the synopsis. Barton has been kidnapped by the Demu, a race of intelligent alien lobsters with nefarious intentions, and must somehow escape. It’s hardly a spoiler to say he succeeds (it would be difficult to have sequels otherwise). But after his escape, the most surprising part begins: the book gets legitimately good!

The book explores the trauma caused by Demu captivity and experimentation in a number of different characters who each react in very different ways. The customary love interest is given actual depth for once and their relationship has to navigate their trauma, which makes it interesting to read about (unlike so many other romance side plots).

I love exploring weird alien races too and the Demu are great. I can’t go into specifics on them without spoiling things, but I’m excited to see more of what Busby has to offer in the sequels!

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

5/10 It's not great, but I rate it as high as I do because I read it when I teenager and remembered it enough to read it again. I enjoyed revisiting it, but I don't really recommend it. I probably won't read the other 2 books in this trilogy because I vaguely remember how it goes.

When I first read it, I didn't realize how old it is (1973). It's weird in ways that are probably off-putting to many. It's fixated on sex. It has body horror. It has body horror related to sex. It deals with a woman's disfigurement from the perspective of a man and how it effects him(!). A teenage boy reader might not notice how odd it is because it kind of feels like a story a teenage boy would come up with.

The main character is like a 1930's hero who can do no wrong. He's a tough as nails military veteran who's also a physicist and also an artist. The story is like 1950's science fiction with "can do" American spirit to figure everything out and fight back against the enemies. Only read it if you're interested in older style science fiction.

[Cuauhtemoc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book with a very unique story about a man kidnapped by an Alien race with no good intentions at all. The start is a little raw and rough. May not be of the like of all readers. Busby places great faith in the survival instincts of the human race. I do not know if I would be capable of scaping my captors (or flying a spaceship back home for that matter). I enjoyed the book a lot and went straight into reading the second one in the series, "The Proud Enemy".
This is one of the books that I am keeping as part of my SciFi collection. The art cover is great also!

[Benjamin · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars

The first section, “A Cage There Was” (about a third of the book) is 4 or 4 1/2 stars; I read it one sitting, which is the first time I’ve done something like that in many years.

The second part, “Humpty Dumpty”, is more like 2 stars. It drags, much more staid, and lacking in what makes the first part interesting.

Nicholas Cage would make a good Barton.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short and pulpy 70’s sci fi. Watch out for the lobsters.

[Adam Clark · Rating 3 out of 5]

A vicious new wave wolf in golden age pulp sheep’s clothing. Or maybe the other way around.

[Kevin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Busby begins with a suspenseful premise, and for a bit it appears as though he has a good story to tell, but once Barton, his protagonist, escapes and returns to Earth with far too much ease things go awry in a big way. At a novella's length, this would have been great. Busby stretches it as far as it would go here, and then he wrote a sequel.

Don't you love that cover? Used bookstores don't. By which I mean, they wouldn't buy it back. Not the store in Alpine I bought it from, not anybody. I begged the owner of Cosmic Squire Books and Records in Wichita to take it off my hands and he wouldn't have it, even for free.

[Erik Graff · Rating 1 out of 5]

Purchasing books from resale shops and used bookstore sale tables, knowing nothing of them but their genre and low cost, is rather like bringing strangers home at 4am from bars. I have managed to avoid the occasionally dread consequences of the latter, but enthusiasm has led to disasters as regards the former.

It is, however, Busby's first book. He may have improved.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

My hands down favorite of all time!!! A fast-paced adventure that fascinates and delights!

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as a kid and liked it well enough to hang on to my bookclub copy for 35 years.

[Brett]

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