“The Visible Man”. Gardner Dozois (1975)

In “TO SEE THE INVISIBLE MAN” (1963), Robert
S
ILVERBERG described a future in which society
punishes criminals and dissidents by making it a
crime to recognize their existence, a form of imposed invisibility. Gardner D
OZOIS turned the concept around for this long story in which an equally
repressive state uses psychological conditioning on
prisoners so that they are incapable of seeing any
other form of animal life, people, dogs, even insects. Although this makes it easy to control them
while imprisoned, since they cannot see their
guards, the author tells us that the condition is imposed because of its innate cruelty rather than for
practical reasons.
The protagonist is one such prisoner, whose
specific crime we never learn, who escapes when
the vehicle in which he is being transported is involved in an accident. Where Silverberg concentrated on the psychological effects on his
protagonist, Dozois describes in great detail the
physical difficulties of this limited sightlessness.
The fugitive cannot remain out in the country,
where he could be easily detected by body heat, so
he heads for more settled areas, with awkward,
sometimes comical results. Eventually, he hits
upon the idea of masquerading as a conventional
blind man, but his disguise fails to work because he
can in fact see, and his reaction to those elements
in his environment that are not living beings gives
him away. He encounters a representative of what
appears to be an underground organization dedicated to helping escaped prisoners, but the situation begins to seem increasingly artificial,
culminating in our discovery that we have been
misled about the entire situation, which is actually
a complex virtual reality game. Although the story
has less ambitious goals than most of Dozois’s
other work, it is one of the most satisfying examples of the logical development of an unusual situation to explore its physical ramifications.

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