The novel “Manseed” by Jack Williamson was published for the first time in 1982.

The Defender wakes up confused and doesn’t even recognize his own body, which looks quite human but without genitals. He has various memories of different people that don’t help him understand what’s happening to him and around him. He hears a voice that seems familiar to him since it belongs to Megan Drake but it quickly becomes clear that it’s a reproduction.

The voice that communicates with the Defender is that of a spaceship that was damaged by a meteorite. The Defender must assess the damage and try to repair it in order to resume the mission of finding a habitable planet where humans based on samples chosen on Earth many millennia earlier can be born and grow up.