I put this on my SF Mistressworks list several years ago based on its reputation, and the fact it won a Nebula, although that was for the original novella, not the novel (although the novel too was nominated four years later). MacLean’s name popped up a number of times in Judith Merril’s (auto)biography (see here) – she was part of the same Futurians group, with Merril and Pohl, banging out stories for the sf mags, which garnered praise from the likes of Damon Knight and Brian Aldiss. So it came as something of a surprise to discover that Missing Man was actually sort of rubbish. George is an idiot savant – an uneducated orphan, physically strong but good-natured, with an unnaturally strong empathic ability. He meets up with a friend from childhood, who is in the Rescue Squad, and is hired as a consultant because he can use his ability to find missing people. Meanwhile, there’s a blackmail plot by a gang of teenagers, who have kidnapped a city engineer (the missing man of the title) and learnt of a design flaw in the city’s systems. As proof of this, they cause the collapse of two undersea cities, killing thousands. MacLean clearly just made shit up as she went along. It’s bad enough that Missing Man, a mid-1970s novel, reads more like a mid-1960s one, but then you come across a line like “The distilled water, being pure and without salts, carried no radiation back from the ‘hot’ place it circulated through”, and it’s clear the author’s grasp of science is feeble at best… But then, from what Merril wrote in her autobiography, they were really quite cynical about writing for money, and would bang out any old crap, knowing that Pohl, as editor, would buy it (although he pocketed half of the fee). I had expected much more of Missing Man, given the author’s reputation. Disappointing. ( )

Some interesting speculative ideas, some nice interpersonal scenes, some awful info dumps, unconvincing motivations... the usual hodgepodge in 1970's SF. The original novella won a Nebula which says a lot about how far SF writing has come.

New York City has broken up into immigrant enclaves, at an uneasy truce with each other. There are also a few underwater dome cities, but they seem to exist primarily for plot purposes. The core SF idea is one that Campbell may have provided, as was his habit: people in trouble give off vibes that affect the behavior of the people around them. The Rescue Squad uses empaths and incident statistics to triangulate and locate such people. All this is explained in the aforementioned info-dumps.

The story follows the development of George Sanford, a very strong empath with fairly weak social and critical reasoning skills -- almost a Lenny to his friend Ahmed's George. Though told primarily from George's point of view, a lot of his backstory and motivations are not revealed until fairly late. Most of the plot, politics, philosophy and science are clumsily presented, but there are enough nicely done human-sized set pieces to make the book overall worth a quick read. ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/213781.html

This book, published in 1975, is a fix-up of three stories published in Analog between 1968 and 1971 featuring psychic detective George Sandford, the last of which won a Nebula. The setting is remarkable - New York in a world recovering from environmental catastrophe, where there is much greenery and derelict buildings (and vulnerable underwater suburbs), and significant social control in return for quality of life. Sandford's somewhat seedy character and his feelings of blurred identity when he tries to read the minds of criminals (or their victims) are quite vivid. It is reminiscent of Alfred Bester, Philip K Dick and John Brunner. MacLean was obviously a pretty talented author who simply didn't produce as much as the other three; the only other story by her I remember reading is "The Snowball Effect", about the small town sewing circle that takes over the world. ( )