Trillionaire Lucius Sterling is the founder and owner of Sterling Nanotech. But he didn't invent the nanotechnology that feeds the world and provides Deathlessness to the super-rich. That technology was invented by the brilliant idealist Leonardo Fontesca, who wants to save everyone in the world from death. But Fontesca is only an employee of Sterling Nanotech. Lucius Sterling decides who is worthy of immortality, and he allows only a few rich people to become Deathless. The assassins seek to liberate Deathlessness for everyone.

When the assassination attempt goes awry, Alexa finds herself both Deathless and legally bound into Sterling's service for the next several hundred years. Sterling isn't the man Alexa thought he was, and she becomes his greatest bodyguard, protecting him and his descendants as new generations are born, raised and made Deathless. She bonds with Lucius' grandson, Jack Sterling, who—deathly allergic to nanotech—is condemned to live, age and die alone in a glass bubble. Then an unknown terrorist's nanotech "dissembler" dissolves Manhattan and Paris and other cities, vaporizing millions of modified humans and threatening to destroy even the Deathless Sterlings on their remote, nanotech-built island fortress. Now the unmodified mortal Jack Sterling—unaffected by the dissembler—is humankind's last hope.

Postulating the nanotech posthuman

At the turn of the millennium, Syne Mitchell began releasing a string of stand-alone hard-SF novels—Murphy's Gambit (2000), Technogenesis (2002), The Changeling Plague (2003) and End in Fire (2005)—that have earned her praise from readers, critics and some SF giants, including Greg Bear, Spider Robinson and Vernor Vinge. With The Last Mortal Man, she launches her first series, The Deathless. If this ambitious opening volume is any indication, the series will be interesting, action-packed and powerful.

In The Last Mortal Man (2006), Mitchell does an impressive job of extrapolating how nano-biology will transform the physical and socioeconomic worlds of Earth, and she presents some surprising twists on a technology that is becoming, in SF, almost as old-school as cloning. Even more impressively, Mitchell shows how the full flowering of nanotechnology will create a deeper divide between those eternal classes, the haves and the have-nots. Her have-nots are modified: They enjoy longer, richer, healthier lives than pre-nanotech humans. But her haves are no longer human. With their freedom from the need to eat and sleep, their shape-changing abilities, their near-invulnerability—their immortality—the Deathless are gods. But they're gods with humanity's unevolved emotional drives. Mitchell vividly demonstrates how wonderful and terrible such gods would be.

Transpiring across some 150 years, The Last Mortal Man packs an enormous amount of action and change into its 435 pages. This makes The Last Mortal Man a riveting page-turner, yet it also weakens the novel. This is because, with so much happening, Mitchell compresses the characters' emotional reactions to the thrill of their victories and the agony of their defeats. For example, instead of showing the nano-allergic protagonist's shame and anger at his dependence on his isolation chamber and the Sterling family wealth, Mitchell tells us Jack "was ashamed. He straightened, feeling chided, and more than a bit angry." Such swift summaries make it hard for readers to feel the characters' emotions; in effect, they push readers away from Mitchell's interesting, likable characters. This can't often be said, but The Last Mortal Man would be stronger for being longer.