he Fountains of Youth is the third novel (after Inherit the Earth and The Architects of Emortality) in Brian Stableford's future setting in which humans develop the technology to achieve "emortality," or indefinite lifespans. The novel is actually the autobiography of Mortimer Gray, a member of the first generation of emortals and author of a comprehensive history of death.
Mortimer, born in 2520, is raised by eight foster parents in a remote valley in the Himalayas. Their only neighbor is a reclusive Buddhist monastery high on the slopes above. Mortimer discovers that the monastery is much more than it seems--it's actually a repository of historical records and artifacts inside the hollowed-out mountain.
The discovery sparks Mortimer's interest in history. During his second year of university study, he takes a cruise on the Coral Sea. He gets seasick and is below deck in his cabin when disaster strikes. The boat capsizes, and he finds himself alone with an eight-year-old girl named Emily Marchant. Having grown up in the Himalayas, he can't swim, but the two encourage each other and manage to escape the ship and reach a rescue pod. Unfortunately, they find no other survivors from the ship--all 12 of Emily's parents have been lost. They drift in the ocean for days before being rescued, but Mortimer and Emily become lifelong friends, and the event transforms Mortimer's life.
Back at the university, Mortimer decides to make his lifework the research and writing of a comprehensive history of death. His parents disapprove, arguing that death is too morbid a subject. Even Emily tries to dissuade him, but Mortimer persists in the project, one that takes centuries to complete.
Future history and character study
The Fountains of Youth is astonishingly different from its two predecessors. While those books are suspense-filled mysteries set during defining moments in Stableford's future history, this novel contemplates the changes in human perspective that would result from emortality. Stableford seems to have made an odd choice in making Mortimer such a recluse, but it works well, allowing readers to discover this world's surprising cultural and technological developments through Mortimer's eyes. Along the way, Stableford explores the colonization of the solar system, the divergence of the human species into earthbound and space-dwelling variants, and cyborgization. But he focuses on the human reaction to the conquest of the natural causes of death, including movements that view designer diseases as a recreational activity and a cult that argues that emortals should kill themselves after a "normal" lifespan.
At its heart, however, The Fountains of Youth is a character study of a prominent member of the first emortal generation. Mortimer has plenty of interesting quirks, most of which relate to his natural reclusiveness and stubbornness, his obsession with his history project and his tendency to let friendships drift. It's quite illuminating, for example, that his few days with Emily in the rescue pod, and later, several days sharing a hospital room with a stranger, leave a more indelible imprint on him and occupy as many pages in the novel as any of his three marriages. His periodic summaries of his history and the public and critical reaction are fascinating in themselves, and enhance the portrait Stableford paints.
The Fountains of Youth is by far the best novel in a series that already has been quite good. It's very much worth reading.
I was worried at the end of the last novel that Stableford's choice to tell this future history as a series of mysteries was working against his larger ambitions. I'm very happy to see that he took a different approach this time, and it's a wonderful leap in complexity and execution.
-- Clint
n the far-off future of the Expansion, artificial intelligences can achieve legal status as sentient beings. Their vast processing power and long life spans make sentient AIs superior to humans in countless ways, giving them the edge in business--hey, even an AI has to make a living--and pleasure. Especially pleasure of the, um, polymorphously perverse kind. Darling, the eponymous AI hero of Scott Westerfeld's dazzling novel, is no cold-blooded calculator; on the contrary, his insatiable libido would make Casanova turn green with envy and send the Marquis de Sade scurrying back to the loony bin.
Darling begins life as the computational core of an faster-than-light starship. While not navigating through metaspace, he serves as cyber-nanny to a 14-year-old nymphet named Rathere. Soon love, the only thing as paradoxical as quantum physics, blossoms between human and machine. As it does, the AI grows in complexity. The AI is certified sentient, and Darling and Rathere are free to explore the galaxy and each other.
Flash forward 200 years. Darling is alone, the fate of Rathere a mystery. And speaking of mysteries, an unknown sculpture by a famous dead AI artist has surfaced. Darling's art-dealer employers dispatch him to ascertain the authenticity of the piece--and to locate the artist, whom they suspect is very much alive. But Darling is not the only one on the case. He meets Mira, an amnesiac assassin, and they become lovers. As they work to uncover the truth, they are forced into a painful confrontation with their own pasts.
Vibrator and gun philosophy
Scott Westerfeld's interest in the cultural effects of AI and nanotechnology places him in the company of cyberpunk writers like Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. Westerfeld belongs in this exalted company for another reason as well: the sheer abundance and vitality of his talent.
Darling and the other AIs are at once profoundly strange and deeply familiar creations, thoroughly alien yet recognizably human in their thoughts and desires. Especially their desires. Darling and Mira (who in her own way is as artificial as any AI, which is part of Westerfeld's point) have sex at the drop of a hat. Like the novel itself, sometimes their lovemaking is tender, sometimes violent, sometimes funny, sometimes just plain weird. But there is a purpose to it all beyond the erotic. Nietzsche titled one of his books Philosophy with a Hammer. This is philosophy with a vibrator and a gun.
It's hard to decide what to praise most about this novel. The writing is exquisitely sharp, the plot clever and enthralling. The characters, even the minor ones, are fully realized. The culture of the Expansion itself is richly evoked--so much so, in fact, that it would be a crime if Westerfeld did not return to this setting in a future novel. For now, though, lucky readers have plenty to keep them busy in the pages and between the lines of Evolution's Darling.
Science fiction doesn't get much better than this.
-- Paul
he Fountains of Youth is the third novel (after Inherit the Earth and The Architects of Emortality) in Brian Stableford's future setting in which humans develop the technology to achieve "emortality," or indefinite lifespans. The novel is actually the autobiography of Mortimer Gray, a member of the first generation of emortals and author of a comprehensive history of death.
n the far-off future of the Expansion, artificial intelligences can achieve legal status as sentient beings. Their vast processing power and long life spans make sentient AIs superior to humans in countless ways, giving them the edge in business--hey, even an AI has to make a living--and pleasure. Especially pleasure of the, um, polymorphously perverse kind. Darling, the eponymous AI hero of Scott Westerfeld's dazzling novel, is no cold-blooded calculator; on the contrary, his insatiable libido would make Casanova turn green with envy and send the Marquis de Sade scurrying back to the loony bin.