Cheating death, version K

kw: book reviews, science fiction, far future fiction, corpsicles

The first mention of the word "corpsicle" I can find is in The Age of the Pussyfoot by Frederick Pohl in 1969. He wrote, "… no corpsicle has yet been thawed and returned to life, and there's no firm estimate of when one will be." Of course, in the novel, the "frozen zombie" does get thawed and must get used to life in the 23^d Century. The idea had been around for years, an extension of the notion of some kind of cryo-hibernation to be used on long interstellar journeys. Rumors that Walt Disney was frozen upon his death are not true. But a number of people have been frozen in hopes that they can be revived some day and healed of whatever killed them. What is not clear to the casual observer is how their continued preservation at a few hundred degrees below zero is financed.

Let us flash forward a century or ten. If freezing and thawing of people becomes a commodity procedure, the issue of money becomes central. It is unlikely that cryopreservation will be cheap, but perhaps it will be affordable for, say, half of the population. Furthermore, the cost would have to include an escrow account held by a perpetual corporation to pay for thawing and restoration. What happens to wills, estates, and legacies for the heirs of the not quite deceased? Does this become a case (many cases) of, "Oh, yes I can take it with me!"?

Consider further on that somewhere the freezing of any person upon death, or just before, is considered a civil right. How long will it take for the land to be filled with the un-graves of the undead? It is into such a world that Miles Vorkosigan, Lois McMaster Bujold's height-challenged hero, Lord Auditor to the emperor Gregor, is thrust in the new novel Cryoburn.

This may be a book whose plot got away from the author and took a turn she wasn't expecting. There certainly seems to be a plot theme left hanging early on: The book opens with Miles kidnapped by an extremist group that wants the accumulated undead to become dead in reality, a group with the slogan, "Burn the dead!" But they prove to be minor players. The real villains of the piece are the corporations that hold the escrow accounts, and the preserved bodies, of the cryopreserved persons. Miles had been sent to investigate why so many were being frozen but too few were being revived. The kidnapping proves propitious, because Miles drops into an underworld that exposes what is really going on.

This is a semi-spoiler, but an important point: All the chicanery hinges on the fact that one popular preservation method isn't as perpetual as it ought to be, and the corporations are soon to be hit with huge claims for the truly dead customers' assets to be distributed to the heirs. Further, the best way to deal with the problem is to attempt revival of every person frozen by that unfelicitous method, a significant cost in itself, to re-freeze the ones who survive using a better method (at further cost), and to distribute the remaining assets of those that do not survive. Of course none of the corporations is even close to willing to do more than cover it all up. Exposing cover-ups is what a Lord Auditor does best.

This is the fifteenth novel in the Vorkosigan Saga. Although their setting includes multiple planets and low-cost star travel, the planets are really stand-ins for nation-states. Kibou-daini, where the action takes place, is a planetary Japan. Barrayar and allied planets are apparently a Russian federation, and another group seems a European community clone. I don't detect an American-style republic in this book or others in the Vorkosigan series that I have read. Anyway, the space travel part is dispensable. The ideas, plot and action are compelling. The series began with a seventeen-year-old Miles, and he is now 39. The author has plenty of latitude for continuing.