CryoNet #32364 - #32367

CryoNet - Sun 7 Feb 2010

    #32364: Broadcast alert [John de Rivaz]
    #32365: cryonics terminology [oberon]
    #32366: cryonics terminology II [oberon]
    #32367: Review of the unincorporated man [swb1948]

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Message #32364
From: "John de Rivaz" <[email protected]>
Subject: Broadcast alert
Date: Sat, 6 Feb 2010 17:00:28 -0000

Chrissie will be speaking about cryonics on a BBC Radio4 programme:

Monday, 8 February 2010, 16:30 UT on BBC Radio 4 FM 
History of the World Special 
Ernie Rea discusses the meaning of the flood tablet relating part of the Epic of Gilgamesh

A podcast should appear on the web page a few hours after transmission.

-- 
Sincerely, John de Rivaz:  http://John.deRivaz.com for websites including
Cryonics Europe, Longevity Report, The Venturists, Porthtowan, Alec Harley
Reeves - inventor, Arthur Bowker - potter, de Rivaz genealogy,  Nomad .. and
more

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Message #32365
Date: Sat, 6 Feb 2010 09:43:58 -0800 (PST)
From: [email protected]
Subject: cryonics terminology

Message #32363
>From: [email protected]
>Subject: Re: CI growth rate decreasing?

>>David Stodolsky wrote:
>> 163 suspendees predicted by 2010.1.1
>> 85 suspendees actual by 2010.1.1

>  Also, why do you insist on
>using the term "suspendees" rather
>than patients? Even if you do not believe
>that they are patients, or that it is not
>scientific to call them patients, "suspension"
>is (obsolete) non-scientific cryonics jargon.
>"Cryopreserved persons", or even "cryonically
>preserved persons" would be more scientific
>terminology.
>
I'll have to support David's terminology here.
In the eyes of the law, all "suspendees" are corpses.
In BC, any reference to them that implies they  are not dead bodies would
risk the intervention by law inforcement officers. Terms such as patients
or persons can not be applied to corpses. By definition, a patient is a
live human being who is currently under medical treatment. Not only is a
"suspendee" not a live human being, but cryonics itself can not be
refered to as a medical treatment. since these procedures are only applied
to live human being. Aside from the legal risk, referring to
"suspendees" as either persons or patients constitutes fraud by any
definition of the word. There is no single word to decribe the frozen
corpses stored by CI and Alcor, so one has to be invented. I'll assume
"corpsicle" is a termininology that although legal, would not prove to be
popular with people who have spent good money to make cryonics
arrangemnts. "Suspended animation" is also not acceptible in the eyes of
the law, since this implies the "suspendees" are not dead. Using words in
the dictionary, the closest description of corpses stored by cryonics
societies would be frozen corpse. Although in BC "suspendee" would be
suspect due to the resemblance to the terms "suspended animation", one
could likely "get away with it" because this term is not in (at least
my) dictionary. My own current preference is for the most accurate and
honest description: "frozen corpse". Once full vitrification is an option,
I would use the term "vitrified corpse". However for PR purposes, I am
quite sure these terms will never see common usage.

Perhaps members on this list can suggest a new term to replace
"suspendee" that is both fully legal, and yet is still a good PR term?

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Message #32366
Date: Sat, 6 Feb 2010 10:02:16 -0800 (PST)
From: [email protected]
Subject: cryonics terminology II

Tn a bookstore near you there is currently available for sale a book
entitled "Frozen", which is an expose of the lies and deceit endemic to
the cryonics movement. It is very unlikely that such a book would have
ever existed but for the use of deceptive and even fraudulant terminology
by cryonics institutions. If Alcor billed itself as a storage facility for
frozen corpses, the sales of such a book would be zero.

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Message #32367
Subject: Review of the unincorporated man
Date: Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:40:55 -0500
From: [email protected]

----------MB_8CC75CF40D7985B_EB4_146CF_webmail-d035.sysops.aol.com


I promised this review several months ago, but I was waiting for it to be published in Cryonics magazine first.  That's done, so here it is.

Steve Bridge
******************



The unincorporated man by dani kollin and eytan kollin.   Tor Books, 2009
One of the hardest books to write must be the "cryonics novel."
There are not many really good cryonics novels, perhaps not any that would be considered among the all-time great futuristic books.  If you write a novel about cryonics, your choices are limited.  You are pretty much stuck with variations on 1.  Guy gets frozen.  2.  Guy gets revived.   The future is different.  3.  Guy gets attacked and doesn't know why.  4.  Guy figures out future and gets the girl.  Probably the best of these is still Age of the Pussyfoot by Frederik Pohl, written way back in 1969.  (Robert Heinlein's popular The Door Into Summer (1956) is really more a time travel book than a cryonics book.)
Then there is a variation where most of the problems are in the "before getting suspended" part of the story.  The writer can concentrate on today's world and today's human motivations, and write a mystery or suspense drama.  Successful variations on this include The First Immortal by James Halperin (1998) and Chiller by Sterling Blake (pseudonym of Gregory Benford) (1993).  
There are also many novels which merely use cryonics as a tool to save the hero or get the hero to the future, where the real themes of the book can be played out.  My favorite "save the hero" story is the Hugo Award-winning Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold.   My favorite "get the hero to the future" tale is now ...  the unincorporated man (the lack of capital letters is intentional on the part of the authors) by brothers Dani and Eytan Kollin.  The brothers are public cryonicists (Cryonics Institute) but have not written a "cryonics novel."  There is no explanation of cryonics technology or justification for its use, beyond its being an accepted life-saving technology in the future.  Instead, this is a political novel, obviously inspired by Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand, among others.
Justin Cord is a wealthy, inventive, terminally-ill genius (very Heinlein) from today who doesn't trust the current cryonics companies.  He arranges to have himself placed in suspension in a self-sustaining storage unit and buried in a cave under a mountain.  Stretching plausibility, he is discovered about 300 years in the future by a mine explorer and revived.  And boy, is the world different.
The Kollins have developed an extremely well thought-out future, based on an idea by economist Milton Friedman from his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom.  This quote from Friedman leads off the book, "The counterpart for education (financing) would be to "buy' a share in an individual's earning prospects; to advance him the funds needed to finance his training on condition that he agree to pay the lender a specified part of his future earnings.  There seems no legal obstacle to private contracts of this kind, even though they are economically equivalent to the purchase of a share in an individual's earning capacity and thus to partial slavery."
In this future, the world economy and society in general had long before experienced a complete meltdown.  Large corporations took over most of the functions of government, and Western civilization, at least, worked by each individual being a public corporation.  At birth, each person is assigned a number of shares of stock in him or herself.  The government owns some, and the parents own some; but some a person can sell to pay for his education, training, or capital to start a business.  The better one's future earnings prospects are, the more expensive the stock.  If the person does well in life, he might even be able to buy back many of his shares.  This system is stable and understandable.  Yes, there are still less successful people and some who feel trapped by the system; but the wor
 ld as a whole is calm and the economy generally works well.  
Justin Cord is the only survivor from the 21st Century.  The cryonics companies were destroyed in the collapse of society, with a loss of all patients, although a reformed version of suspended animation is commonplace in this future.  (For the sake of the fiction, I forgive the brothers for killing us all off.  It's not much worse than Gregory Benford did in Chiller, where a serial killer murders the dynamic young CEO of a cryonics organization - published a couple of months after I became the dynamic young CEO of Alcor.  "Chiller," indeed.)
Cord was not born into the personal corporation system, so no one quite knows how to handle him.  Most people assume that his earnings potential is huge, as the only living representative of the 21st Century Dark Ages.  Everyone wants a corporate piece of him.  But Cord is a libertarian and refuses to become incorporated, believing that he would be ceding control of his life to others.  Forced to justify his position in court, Cord speaks out to the world and advocates rebellion against the system.   (Justin Cord = John Galt?)
The Kollins' future is worked out in great detail, with many levels, unlike the lazy one-dimensional futures that populate many SF novels.  They are a bit hazy on what happened to the Third World countries; but no one can get everything into one novel.  The characterization is better than in most Heinlein novels.  For example the ostensible villain of the piece has several layers and surprises to him, and is so well-done that there are times that the reader wonders if he will turn out to be one of the good guys instead.  The female psychiatrist who takes on Cord's case is well portrayed as a believable individual.  This ability to create characters bodes well for future novels by these writers.  On the other hand, the romance that pushes part of the plot forward is awkward and the one sex 
 scene is clumsy.  (Will somebody please find these guys some girlfriends?)
Just as cryonics novels can be boring and one dimensional, novels about grand political and social ideas like freedom, responsibility, libertarianism, communism, etc. can turn into a series of self-satisfied and self-approved lectures, with the author's particular point of view being promoted as the truth as obvious as the "revealed truth" of some religions.  Thankfully, the Kollins have given us story about humans dealing with the consequences of these ideas, with doubt, confusion, and tension between various ideas.  Messier than a polemic but a hundred times more interesting.
Actually, BOTH versions of the future (the incorporated mainstream and the libertarian rebellion proposed by Justin Cord) are so convincingly argued by the various characters that this reader bounced back and forth trying to decide which was better.  Easy solutions are boring.  It made me wonder if each brother chose a side in the writing of the book in order to argue them so thoroughly.  That would be an interesting way to co-write a book and provide tension.   
I have some other quibbles.  The ending of the book seems kind of messy and indistinct - hmm, like a lot of Heinlein books.  Also, and perhaps this is inevitable in an SF novel, the authors seem so convinced that their knowledge and philosophy of today is obviously correct that their main character (or maybe they themselves?) could go 300 years in the future and straighten everyone out, as if no one had learned anything new in 3 centuries.  The arrogance is the same as exhibited by writers who send their characters BACK in time hundreds of years to teach everyone what right manners, morals, and politics are.
And I regret that the writers did not better pursue a very important moral issue about Justin Cord's libertarian approach.  As I understand the libertarian ideal, the individual should be able to control his own life and make whatever choices he wants, as long as those choices do not take away anyone else's personal control and choices.  Of course, quite a few of our desired choices could harm others or take their own freedom.  That fuzzy line could be the subject of a whole series of novels, like Isaac Asimov explored the consequences of the Three Laws of Robotics and how they were often in conflict.
Justin Cord's rebellion harms the personal fortunes and the very lives of billions of people, and even as he begins to understand this, he pursues his direction without much regret or moral reflection.  I think there was an even bigger and better book here if that moral struggle could have been brought out.
Still, Dani and Eytan Kollin have succeeded admirably at writing a book of ideas which also completely holds our attention as a novel.  This should be entertaining and thought-provoking for anyone who sees this review.  I borrowed this book from the public library (I'm a librarian, after all); but I think I'll have to buy a copy for my personal library.  You should, too.
 

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