β Scribed by Brian Stableford
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Credibly written but lacking in emotional range, this third installment in
Stableford's Living in the Future series imagines a time when most
humans--nearly immortal--aren't much preoccupied with the subject of death. Born
more than five centuries ago, in 2520, Mortimer Gray is an emortal, a sturdy
genetic composite who was raised in the Himalayas by the standard group of eight
adults. These days, unlike most of his contemporaries, Gray--who long ago
discovered his potential mortality when he barely survived a massive underwater
volcanic eruption--is obsessed with death, and in fact has undertaken a massive
study of how human's ideas about it have affected history. Well before
completing the work, several centuries and nine volumes later, he became both
famous as a popular scholar and notorious as an influence on the Thanaticists,
militant believers in keeping death a part of the human condition to the point
of organizing ritual suicides and creating "recreational diseases." (Meanwhile,
Gray's world has remained in flux--experiments are turning humans into cyborgs
or genetically altered beings with four hands; interstellar probes have
encountered intelligent aliens.) Gray is in some ways a fine narrator, able to
reflect on the events circling around him with a historian's critical eye--but
because he's rather detached, it's hard to get involved in his story. Moreover,
Stableford has written much of this book as if he was composing a literary essay
(complete with excessive foreshadowing)--which makes reading it a bit of a
chore.
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
Credibly written but lacking in emotional range, this third installment in Stableford's Living in the Future series imagines a time when most humans--nearly immortal--aren't much preoccupied with the subject of death. Born more than five centuries ago, in 2520, Mortimer Gray is an emortal,
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