ARTHUR C. CLARKE, 1971
In the 2080s Howard Falcon is left crippled by the crash of the dirigible Queen Elizabeth IV, of which he was Captain. His life is saved by experimental cyborg surgery.
In the 2090s Falcon pilots a solo mission in a balloon craft called Kon-Tiki into the clouds of Jupiter, where he encounters an exotic environment complete with an ecology dominated by immense “herbivorous” beasts he calls “medusae,” which are preyed on by “mantas.”
Falcon’s cybernetic surgery left him with superhuman capabilities but isolated from mankind, for there will be no more such experiments. But Falcon “took sombre pride in his unique loneliness—the first immortal, midway between two orders of creation. He would . . . be an ambassador . . . between the creatures of carbon and the creatures of metal who must one day supersede them. Both would have need of him in the troubled centuries that lay ahead.”
This book is the story of those troubled centuries.