The Common Man

What happens when an ordinary man becomes invisible? Not to himself, but to the world. Mack Reynolds poses this unsettling question in a 1960s science fiction novel that reads like a proto-psychological thriller. When scientists Dr. Frederick Braun, Patricia O'Gara, and Ross Wooley recruit a typical American named Crowley for an invisibility experiment, they believe they're studying the essence of the "common man" - a baseline from which to measure human behavior. They expect humility, perhaps boredom, maybe small transgressions. What they discover is something far more troubling. As Crowley's physical form vanishes, so does his accountability. He begins using his new abilities for personal gain, building a criminal empire and nursing political ambitions that spiral toward chaos. The scientists watch helplessly as their subject transforms into something they never anticipated: a man who, freed from the constraints of visibility and consequence, reveals depths of ambition and ruthlessness that his unremarkable exterior always concealed. Reynolds wrote this as a cold war era thought experiment, and it remains genuinely unsettling - less about the mechanics of invisibility than about what invisible people might become.