The Man in the Maze is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert Silverberg, originally serialized in the magazine Worlds of If in April and May 1968, and published in bookstores the following year.

In 1968, the United States adopted the Architectural Barriers Act, which mandated that public buildings be accessible to people with disabilities.

[1] In a typical literary reversal of the New Wave, in the story, a disabled man uses an alien labyrinthine city to reject abled society.

In doing so Silverberg stressed how "process, ability and disability come to construct and problematize both individual and collective human identity for the past, present, and future".

The main character is Richard Muller, a retired diplomat, who finds himself forced to hide from the human race on the uninhabited planet of Lemnos.

The career diplomat Charles Boardman invited him to make contact with the inhabitants of the planet Beta Hydri IV—the only intelligent alien race thus far discovered in the galaxy.

Ned Rawlins, son of a now-dead friend of Muller's, establishes contact with him and, under the instruction of Boardman, promises him a cure as a means of luring him out of the maze.