Artificial Limbs / Literature

• John Simpson, in the 1632 series, has a prosthetic replacing a lower leg lost in an ambush, in his service during the Vietnam War, first mentioned in the short story "In the Navy", by David Weber. Eddie Cantrell later gets one after losing his leg during the engagement at Wismar, in 1633.
• Absolutely Truly: Truly's father had his right arm blown off by an IED (Improvised Explosive Device), and got it replaced with a prosthetic that has a Hook Hand.
• Isaac Asimov
  • "The Bicentennial Man": In order to become more human, Andrew Martin designs more and more prosthetics. He starts with a simple stomach system and builds more from there, with realistic skin, and eventually a replacement brain. He replaces all of his metal with organic imitations.
  • "C-Chute": While a guest of the Kloros, John Stuart had mangled his hands irreparably. Since they couldn't fix the human hands, they used their advanced chemistry knowledge to grow artificial hands out of artiplasm instead. The new hands are weaker than the originals, and require delicate care.
• ATL Stories From The Retrofuture: Yuri, the "Mercenary Prince," got three after an explosion in the Battle of Houston.
• In one Bill the Galactic Hero story, the titular character has a Swiss Army Foot.
• A Certain Magical Index: Mugino after her fight with Hamazura has a mechanical left arm and right eye. They're mostly indistinguishable from her normal body, but one can hear the gears whirring when she moves them. She also has to periodically have them updated so they don't get out of sync with her natural body. As well, Kuroyoru is a cyborg with mechanical (and detachable) arms, and she can attach additional arms to her back if necessary.
• In Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber series, Benedict has a mechanical arm. It is a temporary replacement because Amberites regenerate limbs. However, this takes months or years. The arm has a role in the novel The Hand of Oberon. In fact, it is "the hand" because the arm moved of its own accord and helped Corwin and Benedict, who implied Oberon was behind. It was true.
• The Chronicles of Dorsa: General Remington lost his leg in a battle and uses a peg leg which gives him an odd hobbling gait.
• In The Chronicles of Professor Jack Baling, a character is described as having blade-like prosthetic legs. Probably something similar to Oscar Pistorius’s.
• Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain lost several fingers in a fight with necrons. The replacements are augmentic.
• In Circle of Magic, Daja, with some help from her foster siblings, creates an artificial leg for her friend Polyam. She also has apparently made a living metal eye.
  • However, her own hand, though coated in living metal, is still just her own hand. It simply produces more of her metal.
• Eternal President Clydesdale from Clocks that Don't Tick replaced one of his arms with a mechanical one. No one knows why. In all likelihood, it was merely a result of his insanity.
• Spoofed by Terry Pratchett in The Colour of Magic with Goldeneyes Silverhand Dactylos, who is such a great architect his employers all tend to try and maim him so he can never make anything more beautiful than the work he's done for them. As he exposits to his current employer, his first employer gave him piles of gold and blinded him (he learned to work by touch, smell and hearing), his second loaded him with silver and then cut off his left hand (he built a mechanical replacement from silver using his knowledge of levers), and his third employer gave him mounds of silk before hamstringing and imprisoning him (he built a hang glider to escape). He winds up by reminding his employer of his promise to let him go free and unharmed now his work is complete, at which his employer says 'I Lied' and promptly has him shot. Dactylos comments on the shoddy quality of the arrowhead before he dies.
• Hertzer Herrick in John Ringo's Council Wars series lost a hand in the first book and received a very trick Steampunk replacement. He'd still rather have a real hand, though.
• Martin Caidin's 1972 novel Cyborg introduced Colonel Steve Austin to the world. This novel was later adapted into The Six Million Dollar Man.
• There's two cases in Dragons of Requiem.
  • In the Song of Dragons trilogy, Dies Irae has his arm bitten off and replaces it with a mace.
  • In the Dawn of Dragons trilogy, Raem Seran loses his arms and legs, and one of his demons replaces them with four different animal parts.
• In McCaffrey's Dragonsdawn Paul Benden has a couple of prosthetic fingers.
• Kol Maros in The Dreamside Road has a robotic right hand. He occasionally comments on the greater strength in his prosthetic.
• Ian Fleming's Dr. No had two artificial hands (here his hands were cut off by the Tong as a punishment where he lost them to radiation in the movie) — he uses them for dramatic effect to enhance his ominous nature.
• Augustus Waters from The Fault in Our Stars has a prosthetic leg due to his osteosarcoma.
  "Excellent! You'll find my leg under the coffee table."
• Commander Raeder in The Flight Engineer has a prosthetic hand to replace one he lost in battle. It's also not sensitive or precise enough to allow him to keep flying, at least until his second-in-command in his new job makes a breakthrough that gets him cleared to fly in emergencies.
• A strictly medicinal version in the Firestar Series contains a neural link that needs quite a bit of conditioning until you associate various grab-bags of synaesthesia with heat, cold, pain and whatnot. They're also just enough like actual human limbs to weird you out when you touch them. Underwhelming, perhaps, but not bad compared to our 2016.
• The Forever War. Mandella loses an arm and thinks he's getting a prosthesis. He's unaware of the technological advances that have been made over the hundreds of years that have elapsed due to time dilation. Turns out they're actually growing him a new flesh-and-blood arm.
  • Later in the book, he meets a fellow officer who lost the entirety of his body below the waist and recieved metal and plastic replacements, rendering him asexual.
• Ryogi Shiki from The Garden of Sinners has an artificial left arm, as her original was torn apart in a fight. It's a magic arm, to boot.
• The ghost story "The Golden Arm" features a woman with just that, whose husband is very greedy. His greed causes her to starve to death ("Meat and cheese cost more each day./ I will not pay and pay and pay,/ And so throw all my wealth away./ Not one penny will you get today."). Her only request is to be buried with her arm, which the husband does... until he digs it up the next night and leaves it under his pillow. The wife's spirit is not pleased about this....
• In The Gray House, Grasshopper/Sphinx, who was born without arms, gains a pair of those, with some fantastic properties that real-life prostheses do not have.
• Hack Alley Doctor: Derrick starts off the story with a prosthetic arm. Hack Alley serves many patients who have prosthetic limbs and organs.
• In Hammerjack, Avalon is forced to amputate one of her arms after being stabbed with a poisoned dagger. When she returns in the sequel Prodigal, she's equipped with a cybernetic replacement.
• In Hammer's Slammers it's not uncommon for veteran Slammers to have prosthetics. However, they are markedly inferior to the original parts and periodically need to be recalibrated by an external computer (a problem if living on a low-tech planet), so soldiers with prosthetics either retire or are reassigned to desk jobs.
• Harry Potter:
  • Peter "Wormtail" Pettigrew is forced to cut off his own hand in the ritual to recreate Voldemort's body. As Voldemort returns to full power, he gives Wormtail a gift for his efforts, a hand made of silver which functions just as well as his old hand. Except for the fact that the hand was eternally devoted to Voldemort and ended up choking Wormtail when he hesitated to attack Harry in the seventh book.
  • Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody has a wooden leg and a magical revolving eye to replace the ones he lost as an Auror fighting against Voldemort. Also, when Professor Kettleburn (the Care of Magical Creatures teacher before Hagrid) retired in order to enjoy time with his remaining limbs, Professor Dumbledore presented him with a set of enchanted wooden prosthetics. Unfortunately, they have to keep being replaced due to Professor Kettleburn's habit of visiting dragon preserves.
• In Heart of Steel, we have three examples:
  • Alistair Mechanus is a (largely self-built) cyborg due to injuries in his backstory. Everything from the hips down has been replaced with metal, as well as his heart, larynx, left eye, and significant portions of skin.
  • Julia receives a limb transplant after her own leg is torn off at the knee near the beginning of the novel.
  • Jim is torn in half and turned into a cyborg with artificial legs, pelvis, and left arm. He turns out to be rather unhappy about this.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
  • In the first book, Zaphod Beeblebrox has a third, artificial arm fitted to improve his ski-boxing. As is often the case with the franchise, the reason changes in the TV series/computer game/movie — in the radio series, he claims he grew the arm "for Trillian".
  • The movie features handkerchief-cultist Humma Kavula, who uses a "platform" of dozens of tiny metal legs... and one gimpy one.
  • The installment Life, the Universe and Everything has Marvin the Paranoid Android receive an artificial leg.
• Honor Harrington, as starting off as a Lord Nelson Expy, loses an arm and eye over the series. After an Eyepatch of Power she gets an artificial eye and arm. Rare in this society because the normal techniques used to regrow limbs doesn't work on her. She has a pulser in the arm and the aiming camera in her eye...
• The Hunger Games: An artificial leg for Peeta after the first Hunger Games. Katniss, having had her eardrum repaired after it was ruptured in the first Games, feigns being able to hear forcefields in Catching Fire during the second games.
• In Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse, Monroe has a white prosthetic arm replacing the one he lost in combat. It can detach and still function to a degree, but afterwards the primitive AI controlling it tends to get screwy and punch him in the face.
• The 1952 Science Fiction novel Limbo by Bernard Wolfe is about a post-World War III world where people willingly amputate their limbs for nuclear-powered prosthetics.
• Liv in the Future: Alix has a prosthetic leg. While he doesn't remember how he lost it, it's implied the Neighborhood Watch was involved somehow.
• In Max Barry's Machine Man, the protagonist Dr. Charles Neumann accidentally crushes one of his legs in an industrial accident. Being an engineer, he designs a better replacement. Then he realizes he wants his legs to match...
• The Malazan Book of the Fallen features occasional appearances by the K'Chain Che'Malle. Considered the native demons of the Malazan world, they were sapient dinosaur analogues. The warrior caste surgically replaced both lower arms with massive blades.
• Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Man Who Was Used Up" makes this at least Older Than Steam, along with Captains Ahab and Boomer from Moby-Dick.
• Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis from the Robert A. Heinlein book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress had a variety of artificial arms that allowed him to do electronic work with the built-in tools.
• In Neuromancer, Ratz, the German bartender at the Chatsubo in Chiba City, has an old Russian military cyberarm, "a seven-function force-feedback manipulator cased in grubby pink plastic." At one point, he uses the arm to crush a hard plastic ashtray to make a point about the bar's strict "no-fighting" rule.
  • In the short story Burning Chrome, set in the same universe, the narrator, Automatic Jack, has a seemingly more advanced prosthetic, which he is implied to have received after being injured in a military operation gone wrong.
• In the Old Kingdom series, Lirael loses a hand in the final battle against the big bad. It's mentioned in the epilogue that Prince Sameth later crafts her a new one, earning her the title Lirael Goldenhand.
• In Clive Cussler's The Oregon Files series, the protagonist Juan Cabrillo has an advanced prosthetic leg that conceals a small pistol, a block of C4, a throwing knife, and a built-in single-shot leg cannon that can blow a hole the size of a dinner plate through your chest.
• Quantum Gravity books' Lila Black becomes a cyborg after an accident.
• The Ultranauts in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space trilogy replace their body parts as they age and fail. Captain John Brannigan is almost entirely robotic at the start of Revelation Space; he can last for hours in total vacuum. He's very old.
• Sookaiya Venatosh from Riesel Tales: Two Hunters. Both of her legs are prosthetic.
• Jack West in Matthew Reilly's Seven Ancient Wonders trilogy sacrificed his left arm to escape from a trap... after he was promised one of these. Luckily for him, this was in the backstory, 10 years before the first novel started so he had time to adjust to his new arm before everything went to hell.
  • Mother in his Scarecrow series looses her leg to a Orca in Ice Station, an unpleasant surprise to a shark in a later novel
• The Ship Who...: Progress in this field is noted in The Ship Who Searched.
• In Stephen Lawhead's second Song of Albion book The Silver Hand, Llew gets a new hand and his Bard gets new eyes in a magical lake. The villains get dissolved.
• Special mention to Skulduggery Pleasant: The titular character is a "living" skeleton who doesn't know how he got reanimated and had his skull stolen by some goblins (a few decades after his reanimation) so took to using one that he won in a poker game (which becomes a sequel hook at the end of the third book). He gets it back in the fourth and it becomes a brick joke as everyone but his sidekick comment on how better his jaw looks.
  • It is never mentioned though whether he won the other skull before or after he lost his own.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire Jaime Lannister receives a crude prosthetic hand made of gold. Unfortunately he needs to use his other hand to tighten it on something, and he can't wield his sword with it at all.
• Fatale, in Soon I Will Be Invincible, is a cyborg who has only a small portion of organic matter left in her. She often bemoans her added weight, but has a full complement of high-tech gadgets to compensate.
• Toby Frost's Space Captain Smith lost the lower half of an arm fighting the Ghast, Number 8, and while he waited for a new organic arm to be grown by the NHS, he had to make do with a bionic arm that had previously belonged to a commando, and which kept trying to kill people.
• The murderous ex-con Chemo in Carl Hiaasen's novel Star Island, having lost his arm to a barracuda in a previous book, has replaced it with a weed whacker, which he demonstrates upon a main character.
• Starship Troopers briefly features the recruiting sergeant, a triple amputee from some unspecified past war. In the book he appears without prostheses on duty for shock value, but simply straps on his lightweight hi-tech units when off duty; the film completely inverts this point by showing him with no legs, and a huge mechanical hand, more like an earth-moving machine than a prosthesis.
• A plot point in Star Trek: Klingon Empire — Klag, who lost an arm in a previous conflict, could be fitted with an artificial replacement. He refuses, though, insisting that he's a Klingon, not a Borg. It's one of the Honor Before Reason issues Doctor B'Oraq has to deal with. Eventually, Klag accepts a biological graft — his dead father's arm to replace his own. It's not as effective but it's a compromise.
• The Yuuzhan Vong of the Star Wars Expanded Universe ritually chop off their own limbs to show their devotion to the gods then get them replaced with a Biotech appendage. Warriors get limbs from the various predatory animals of their home world, while the Shapers replace their fingers with surgical instruments.
• Togetherly Long: Oukii has one because his arm was vaporized in a duel when the evil Emperor Von Mal shot it with his Ray Gun, and he had to receive a robotic replacement.
• In The Traitor Son Cycle, after Gabriel loses an arm, the Wyrm has a replacement made of metal. It's magic, so it look, feels and acts like a normal hand, but it has all the toughness of its original material.
• The titular Violet Evergarden is equipped with a pair of 'Adamant Silver' prosthetic arms, having lost her original ones in a highly traumatic battle during the Continental War. They are advanced well beyond even 21st century technology, despite the roughly 1910s time period, much like the example set by Fullmetal Alchemist. After a readjustment period, Violet can use her new hands to type faster than almost anyone else while maintaining impeccable grammar and spelling. They're also, to a degree, bulletproof, though they don't hold up against sustained fire and stress.
• The Wing Commander IV novelization states Jason "Bear" Bondarevski loses an arm during the conclusion of the Kilrathi War, and has it replaced with a cybernetic substitute. In False Colors, he's given the opportunity to have it modified to give him an Unusual User Interface, but declines.
• Nick Chopper, the Tin Woodsman from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. For those who don't know his origin story, his axe was cursed by a witch, and one by one, he chopped off his own limbs. Every time he lost one, he had it replaced with a prosthetic made by a local tinsmith — up to and including his head and torso... but not, alas, his heart.
  • For an extra dose of Mind Screw, a sequel reveals someone later reassembled and reanimated the discarded body parts with use of some magic glue... creating a whole new character.
• The X-Wing Series enjoys this trope. Nawara Ven's cybernetic replacement leg synched up relatively (95%) poorly with his body, so he switched careers from Ace Pilot to executive officer. Ton Phanan had an ever-increasing percentage of himself replaced since he was allergic to bacta, and cybernetics ate his future. Krennel, a villain, had an extremely obvious prosthetic hand that glowed red.
  • When the team infiltrated Empire-controlled Coruscant as part of a covert operation, getting Wedge through security posed a problem, since he was a well known rebel hero. He disguised himself as an imperial officer with a bulky cybernetic arm and metal plating on his face and throat, apparently on his way to a specialized hospital to receive more sophisticated implants. People who saw him looked more at the prosthetics than the remaining flesh, and remembered him more for that than anything else. He was counting on that; many Imperials are uneasy around cyborgs. Wedge took this guise again in Isard's Revenge, this time in smoother-looking prosthetics.
  • Hobbie Klivian, being prone to crashes, has an artificial left arm, an artificial right leg, and an artificial left leg, probably more. Darklighter also had a scene where Biggs hinted that the same fight that took Hobbie's arm also left him needing artificial genitalia.
  • Nawara Ven loses part of his leg when his fighter is shot and damaged, and is fitted for a prosthetic. It's not quite enough to let him keep flying, though, so he moves into an administrative role.
• Dorn Graybrook from the The Year of Rogue Dragons trilogy survived a red dragon attack as a child that left him missing half his limbs. A wizard replaced them with iron golem limbs that had to be periodically (and painfully) replaced as he grew.

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