- Halperin, James L. The First Immortal. New York:
Del Rey, 1998. ISBN 0-345-42182-5.
- As Yogi Berra said, “It's hard to make predictions,
especially about the future.” In this novel, the author tackles one of
the most daunting challenges in science fiction: the multi-generation
saga which spans its publication date. There are really only two
ways to approach this problem: show the near future in soft focus,
concentrating on characters and avoiding any mention of news and
current events, or boldly predict and take your lumps when you
inevitably get it wrong. Hey, even if you do, odds are the books
will either be on readers' shelves or in the remainder bins by the
time reality diverges too far from the story line. Halperin opts for
the latter approach. Preachy novels with an agenda have a tendency
to sit on my shelf quite a while until I get around to them—in this
case six years. (The hardcover I bought in 1998 is out of print, so
I've linked to the paperback which remains available.) The agenda
here is cryonics, the resurrection myth of the secular humanists,
presented in full dogmatic form: vitrification, cryogenic storage of
the dead (or their heads, for the budget-conscious), nanotechnological
restoration of damage due to freezing, repair of disease damage and
genetic defects, reversal of aging, organ and eventually full body
cloning, brain state backup and uploading, etc.—the full mambo chicken
meme-bag. The book gets just about everything
predicted for the years after its publication as wrong as
possible: Xanadu-style back-links in Netscape, the
Gore administration, etc. Fine—all were reasonable extrapolations
when the first draft was written in 1996. My problem is that the
further-out stuff seems, if anything, even less plausible than the near
term predictions have proved to be. How likely is it that artificial
intelligences with a hundred times the power of the human brain will
remain subservient, obedient slaves of their creators? Or that a
society with full-on Drexler nanotechnology and
space stations outside the orbit of Pluto would be gripped by mass
hysteria upon learning of a rain of comets due a hundred years
hence? Or that a quasi-socialist U.N. style World Government would
spontaneously devolve freedom to its subjects and reduce tax rates
to 9.5%? And doesn't the requirement that individuals brought back
from the freezer be sponsored by a living person (and hence remain
on ice indefinitely if nobody steps up as a sponsor) represent an
immoral inter-generational breach of contract with those who paid to
be frozen and brought back to life under circumstances they
prescribed? The novel is well-written and presents the views of the
cryonicists faithfully and effectively. Still, you're left with the
sense of having read an advocacy document where story and characters
are subordinate to the pitch.
August 2004 