thousand-year sleep on ice? Such is the curious fate that befalls the three main protagonists of Brian Stableford's new novel, the sixth and climactic installment of his series begun with Inherit the Earth (1998). (The book's title refers to sleeping away the millennia until the final day when God bootstraps himself out of the entropic universe, a voyage which is never actually undertaken in these pages.) Yet their wakening from such a long suspension, incredible as it is, is merely the opening step in a welter of bizarre adventures in the year 3263.
Our narrator, Madoc Tamlin, was a sly dirty-tricks bagman before he was frozen, helping the ruling cabal of rich men who ran the Earth of the 21st century. His revived peers are Christine Caine, a mass murderer, and Adam Zimmerman, the "man who stole the world" and first launched the species-wide quest for longevity that has finally achieved success in the 33rd century. The trio have been brought back to life in a "microworld" habitat in deep space, a habitat staffed by what appear to be prepubescent children.
Arriving shortly to greet the thawed old-timers are the legendary historian Mortimer Gray, as well as representatives of various other solar-system political factions and genetic clades. With the presence of these subtly jousting VIPs, Tamlin begins to suspect that not everything is as serene in this new era as he had been led to believe. And, in fact, rumors of war are abroad. Not to mention the rather alarming prospect of disassembling the sun's gas-giant planets to construct a Dyson sphere to protect humanity from the Alkahest, a kind of all-enveloping sludge bent on conquering the galaxy.
Departing the microworld in a ship for Earth, Tamlin and his associates are hijacked by one of the competing machine intelligences who prove to be the real powers behind the various planetary thrones. Isolated on a hidden base, the humans are stripped of the Internal Technology they have relied on since infancy and subjected to various virtual environments intended to elicit their cooperation. It seems as if only the primitive vigor and cunning of Madoc Tamlin will be able to avert war and redeem the humans from their captors.
An ambitious and visionary universe
One has to admire Brian Stableford's ambition and energy. In four short years, he has produced six massive books outlining a future history of nearly 1,300 years' duration. And not just any simplistic future history, either, with stale rehashes of interstellar empires rising and falling. Instead, he has arrowed in on what is incontestably mankind's greatest challenge: The conquest of death, the achievement of "emortality," a word which Stableford explains captures the nature of endless life still subject to fatal accidents better than "immortality."
He has populated his universe with scads of intriguing characters, spread across a variety of venues, and not all of whom are ardent idealists in the quest for perpetual life. And he has alternated the forms of his books, in Cabellian fashion, among various types of comedy and mystery. Additionally, he has not neglected the philosophical implications of his themes, nor forgotten to portray ancillary technological changes (such as the fascinating Internal Technology reminiscent of John Varley's symbiotic intelligent suits). This is the soul of scrupulous speculation at its finest. (If, occasionally, the play of ideas assumes a somewhat domineering stance over the action, Stableford recognizes this Wellsian pitfall and usually swiftly compensates.)
The books in this series, which need to be read out of the order of publication, are all handily summarized in the introduction to this ultimate volume. Yet there's still a plethora of new intellectual material here to assimilate, such as Stableford's depiction of virtual reality as a kind of "hyperexistence," his portrait of ecological tumult and his cutting-edge bio-theorizing, all interlarded with the political machinations of both humans and machines. (In acknowledgement of this complexity, Stableford even has Madoc Tamlin think at one point, "It was going to require a maximum effort to keep up with the plot now that it had begun to thicken all over again.")
But what carries us through all the hugger-mugger is the engagingly roguish character of Madoc Tamlin, a human from closer to our own time who offers a useful entry point into the world of the far future, since we get to learn things in the same manner he does. Additionally, the reformation of murderer Christine Caine offers another emotional anchor. Finally, the epilogue concerning the fate of Adam Zimmerman (note how his A-Z initials hint at the way his biography frames the book) offers a touching coda.
