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.

The other is a mirror to ourselves

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, far future fiction, space aliens

I thought long and hard about how much to reveal of Echo, Jack McDevitt's latest space opera. Humanity has been in space 8,000 years, traveling hundreds of light years takes less time than driving from Florida to California, and a moderately wealthy antiquities dealer named Alex Benedict can afford his own starship. In eight millennia of looking, only one sentient alien species has been discovered, and they are called the Mutes, for reasons never detailed in this novel. Beyond that, I'll come down on the side of dealing in ideas, not in story plots.

The central thought is expressed by a comment made by a minor character. Faced with a cosmos nearly empty of Others, humanity is faced with only the "echo of themselves". And Echo is the name chosen for a stellar system upon which a mystery rests. Suppose we achieve star travel, look everywhere, and find that we truly are alone. Then what? The question that informs this tale is, yes, one other alien civilization has been found, but no others: Now what? Does that make our existential angst worse or better?

To the quintessential businessman, everything is business. A travel agency CEO becomes the villain of the piece, but like my thoughts on, "Does the Devil know he is evil?", author McDevitt has a quote opening one chapter that begins, "Truly evil persons do not recognize their own malevolence." It is attributed to Tao Min-wa, whom I cannot verify, so it may be a "future quote", as several are in the chapter headings. But I like finding an author whose thoughts echo my own.

Throughout the book's quest, Alex and his assistant Chase are dogged by the attentions of a hired killer. Chase becomes the hero who eventually thwarts the assassin, just as she is nearly the first victim. I was reminded of old "Assassin's Guild" cornball routines. This requires a digression.

When I was in college, forming a non-lethal Assassin's Guild was a popular pastime. People would think up creative ways to do someone in, then act them out with harmless props, like a pillow instead of an anvil to be dropped on someone's head. One of the spy series that was popular on TV at the time took up the theme in one episode, which opened with someone actually getting killed in an AG sort of way: a cartridge had been secreted into a telephone handset, which went off when a tuning fork of a certain pitch was struck, killing the person who'd answered the phone. The creativity theme was carried along for a while, but when it came time to bump off the hero of the series, all these creative people grabbed pistols and began running around almost like a Keystone Kops version of guerrilla fighters. It was hilarious!

That is how I felt here. The killer's first attempt was overly elaborate, and requires readers who don't know any science: A lovely artifact arrives in the mail. It is stated as being the size of Chase's forearm, so it's no more than a cubit in length, about half a meter. When she sets it upright, lights come on inside, but then she begins to suffocate. Turns out it is sucking the oxygen out of the room. She gets rescued of course. But an explanation is offered that ruins it. The object is said to be filled with powdered magnesium and there is also a battery-operated cooling device. When the magnesium gets cold, it quickly absorbs oxygen.

There is a limit to the amount of disbelief I can suspend. I know enough chemistry to realize you can't get cold magnesium to absorb anything. It is a flammable metal, and the oxidation of the metal is ferociously hot (I've done it). A magnesium flare is the brightest one there is! Chase would have run for her life, not stayed around long enough for the oxygen level to drop. Further, there is more oxygen in a room than one might imagine, plus, Chase is told the device removed the oxygen from the whole floor of the house.

Let's do a little math. Under ordinary conditions, near the temperature and pressure a scientist calls STP (the S is for standard), air weighs about 1.28 grams per liter (g/l). Twenty percent is oxygen, or 0.256 g/l. An ordinary living room contains about 50 cubic meters, or 50,000 liters. The oxygen in that volume weighs 12.8 kg. A magnesium atom combines with one oxygen atom, but weighs 1.52 times as much, so absorbing 12.8 kg of oxygen requires 19.5 kg of the metal powder. That is upwards of forty pounds, something Chase is unlikely to be able to lift with one hand. And what about that bit that the whole floor of the building was deoxygenated? A modest house's first floor has a volume greater than 200 cubic meters, contains 50-60 kg of oxygen, which would require 75-90 kg of magnesium. So, that's two strikes against this idea. The chemistry won't work, and the mass of reactive metal would be much too great.

The other brainstorms attributed to the hired killer are at least remotely plausible. And in the end, a "proton cannon" is used. The range of energetic protons in air is about a meter, so you have to get the cannon rather close to its target. In this story, it seems to have a greater range... Oh, well, just like in the spy story, when you really gotta kill someone, may as well use a gun.

Businessman plus hired killer. That's one element. There is the true believer, an explorer who spent more than a century looking for aliens and didn't find any. There are two people who, added to Alex and Chase, make this a double love story. And Alex and Chase themselves, what drives them? They are two faces of an ultimate realist, one who wants to know the truth, regardless, one who wants to get it right.

Now I must back off and say I really enjoyed the book. The author is a compelling writer, and the basic ideas kept me thinking throughout. I tend to swing back and forth between Fermi's question, "Where is everybody?" and, "When we get out there, they'll be everywhere." Maybe civilizations are rare "out there", but I can't imagine they are so rare that we are the only one in our Galaxy (we have little hope of ever communicating with anybody in another galaxy). The question asked by this book is, "But what if we are?"

Surviving the death of Earth

kw: book reviews, science fiction, far future fiction

Terraforming Earth, by Jack Williamson: Why would there be a need to terraform Earth? As the second-ever Grandmaster of SciFi tells it, someday Earth will get clobbered by a big asteroid or comet. His someday just comes around sooner.

The comet in the 1998 movie Deep Impact is 11 km (7 mi) across, which is considered big enough to end civilization. The initial impactor of this book—there are more than one, with unknown amounts of time in between—is stated as ten miles across, or 16 km. The Cretaceous impact that made the dinosaurs, and 85% of all animal species, extinct was 10 km (6 mi), so the size is in the right range, except for one thing. The aftermath of the 16 km impact, with about four times the energy of the Cretaceous impact, is described as making Earth entirely lifeless. That's a bit implausible.

Life is tough. Metazoan (complex) life is not nearly as tough as bacterial life, but it is pretty durable. The biggest danger from an impact that doesn't melt the planet's crust is "impact winter" caused by the heavy dust cover that would block the sun for a year or two. Lots of unlikely critters survive the long winters of the polar latitudes.

Jack Williamson's post-impact Earth is running with lava. That would require multiple impacts with objects in the 200 km range. A renewed Hadean Era would last a few tens of millions of years. Those self-repairing robots had better be able to make repair parts from moon dust! With such quibbles aside, what's the story? Pretty cool, really.

A visionary scientist, who is fortunately a pretty good fund-raiser, establishes a colony on the Moon, designed to preserve a cross-section of Earthly life, cultural artifacts and learning. Overseen by advanced robots (I pick the 23^d Century for this to be possible), the colony is prepared to clone selected persons and train them to return to Earth and re-establish an ecosystem, and finally to re-populate the planet. All is designed for the very long term.

Everything goes awry when the comet comes too soon, and only a handful of people escape the Earth. Only a fraction of the tissue bank is in place in Tycho Station, and only a fraction of the storage spaces for artifacts and libraries is in use. Nonetheless, there is enough to make an attempt. Beginning some decades after the impact, the clones of five people are "born", raised, and trained for their mission.

The book, told from the point(s) of view of a succession of clones of the colony Historian, follows the staccato journey through time of these five and a few others who are added to them at various stages. In some intervals, thousands or millions of years pass before a new set of clones is deemed to be required by the overseeing computer system. Earth is actually terraformed several times, as successive impacts, unknown amounts of time between them, re-sterilize Earth, fortunately also removing an inimical race of aliens at one point.

Finally, Earth's population clears up the impact risk by developing to the point that their technology can remove all threatening comets and asteroids. At this point, living clones of the original Tycho colonists are redundant, and face an uncertain future.

A yarn like this one makes me wonder, how likely is it that any agency or organization will be able to set up a repopulation colony on Moon or Mars? So far, it takes great amounts of resources for a major nation like the US just to accumulate about a hundred man-hours of Lunar visits: It cost $2Billion in the 1969-73 time frame. That's about $10-20B today, but at a time when there's less interest in doing something like that among the nation's people. We are about to retire the Space Shuttles; in at most five years they will fly no more. No viable replacement has been identified, and it would take ten years to produce, anyway.

Someday I'll gather the data to write a riff on how space has proved to be too expensive for us.

On the boundary between cyborg and human

kw: book reviews, science fiction, far future fiction, space opera, cyborgs, golems, androids, terraforming

Chris Moriarty is prone to leaving as much as he can to a reader's imagination and inference. For me, it is on the boundary between refreshing and irritating. Usually, when I can't figure out what his novel's characters just figured out, I get it within a page or two, sometimes because Moriarty explains, sometimes because my slow brain catches on.

Spin Control follows his successful novel "Spin State" with an equally readable, even more idea-packed story. The genre is hard science, far enough in the future that it verges on fantasy, but Moriarty has done his homework, and the technicalities are not-too-wild extrapolations of current trends and speculations.

Some four centuries hence, the human race has taken charge of its own evolution, and taken computing close to quantum limits, to produce a number of "near relatives" with various amounts of integrated machinery, from AIs of several kinds, to Golems (cyborgs with no childhood), to the all-biological but engineered products of several "syndicates", and at least one "Emergent AI" who has "lived" on the delicate edge of growth and destruction for a few centuries, partly due to its being "shunted" to a series of rented human bodies. Other AIs, that control groups of shunted human "volunteers" such as military squads, are found to be most stable when kept ignorant of what they are really doing, by being deceived that they are playing an elaborate game with really good virtuality; once one of these figures out what it is really doing, it promptly suicides...or is that self-destructs?

While many recent books have scene shifts nearly every page, thus resembling episodes of modern TV soap operas, each chapter in Spin Control has a venue and a cast, usually all centered on Arkady, the protagonist here. The chapters' scenes hang together better than those in most novels. Arkady is an A-level clone produced by the Rostov Syndicate. He is more victim than protagonist, only finding out what he was really sent to do in the closing pages of the novel.

Arkady begins by defecting from the Ring (space colonies in the synchronous orbit) to Earth. He'd previously been on a terraforming team to the well-kept-secret planet Novalis. Early survey and seeding probes had visited, and ten clones form four syndicates were sent to see how well the process is going. Seems it was going much too well, and some trouble ensued that Arkady doesn't know how to parse...yet. One result was a new kind of virus that enhances fertility, if that's all it does. Earth really needs that, because the population has crashed to the point that most people are walking ghosts—infertile and unlikely ever to reproduce.

Of course, there is more to it than that, and Arkady becomes a much coveted, much abused pawn in a high-stakes bidding war. It takes the long-lived Emergent AI Cohen and an old memory in a young commando to bring about the denouement: one really nasty character is eliminated, and the long-deceived military AIs learn not only what they are doing, but enough of what has kept Cohen alive, to take appropriate control of their own fates.

I like a hopeful ending...even if it is a setup for more sequels!