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Product Description
In 1988, Benjamin Smith suffers a massive heart attack. But he will not die. A pioneering advocate of the infant science of cryonics, he has arranged to have his body frozen until the day when humanity will possess the knowledge, the technology, and the courage to revive him.
Yet when Ben resumes life after a frozen interval of eighty-three years, the world is altered beyond recognition. Thanks to cutting-edge science, eternal youth is universally available and the perfection of cloning gives humanity the godlike power to re-create living beings from a single cell. As Ben and his family are resurrected in the mid-twenty-first century, they experience a complex reunion that reaches through generations--and discover that the deepest ethical dilemmas of humankind remain their greatest challenge. . . .
Amazon.com Review
In 1988, Benjamin Franklin Smith suffers a massive coronary and is placed into cryonic suspension, igniting a storm of controversy among his suspicious relatives. In 2072, on his 147th birthday, he is reanimated by his great-grandson, rejoining a world in which such procedures--along with eugenic selection, virtual reality, and nanotechnology--have become commonplace. Ben's friends, children, grandchildren ,and mother are also given second chances in this brave new world; technology has even made it possible for Ben to have his dead wife cloned as an infant, raised by their son (also frozen and revived) to an adulthood in which she marries him again.
If this sounds a bit bewildering and overwhelming, it is, but it's also fascinating and often has the ring of genuine prediction. As in Halperin's first novel, The Truth Machine, the technology is always front and center, but this is ultimately a story of people and the political and sociological implications of near immortality.
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