| SF Reviews by Aaron M. Renn | By Author - By Title - By Date Reviewed |
Conclusion: Recommended
When noted SF bookstore The Stars Our Destination moved to about two blocks from my house, I had no choice but to go check out the new digs. And once there I could not resist picking up a few used items, including this gem by Simak. I'd never read anything by him before, and selected this one specifically to get some exposure. Looks like I made a good choice.
I've long believed that one of the consequences of practical immortality would be that people would become hyper-cautious. Today we all know we're gonna go some time, and disease or accident can strike at any moment. While we view a life cut short as tragedy, the net present value of a few extra years or decades doesn't tip the scales against engaging in moderately risky behavior. With disease wiped out and old age banished, life becomes an annuity and the calculations change. Perhaps I'm wrong and humans, especially the young, will always make what seem to be foolishly risky choices. But I think there is a good chance that we'd stop taking chances, as it were. Ever today safer cars, water, food, etc haven't brought a sense of relief, but rather an ever increasing desire to eliminate even more risks at even greater cost. This would make an interesting SF story I think - a future society where everyone is immortal and lives in a germ free bubble or something, and won't even take the stairs, etc. - and I've even be tempted to write one if I didn't think the topic was so obvious and quite likely done before.
But the closest I've found to it is in Simak's novel. The setting is a society about 200 years in the future where people have bought wholesale into cryogenics. When you die, you're frozen awaiting that point when death will be eradicated, at which point you'll be revived for your next life - one of youth immortal. Where Simak approaches my thesis is in how people plan for the future. He takes the intertesting approach that people know they will need to sock away a ton of money to enable them to survive when they are finally revived. Thus everyone lives a life of asceticism, skimping on milk at lunch and the like in order to save for the next life. People are hyper risk averse. Not to preserve life for its own sake, but rather to extend the work life as long as possible to put away that all important nest egg. (The elderly face a different dilemma. No longer capable of working, they can only dig into their nest egg rather than adding to it. Read the book for their solution).
It isn't a pleasant place to live, and Simak goes out of his way to portray the place unsympathetically. Other than raw scientific advance, which provied unlimited food, energy, and the like, there is little to recommend about this particular future. Is he perhaps trying to tell us to live a little? I don't know much about his philosophical viewpoint, but writing in the 60's in a time of social upheaval after the somewhat sterile and stifling advances of the 50's, this isn't much of a stretch. (The parallels between the Holies and Loafers of the story with the hippies is obvious).
Dan Frost is a mid-level bureaucrat at the Forever Center, the corporation that grew up around cryogenics. When you die, it is the Forever Center that retrieves and stores your body. And because the frozen put their assets in trust with the Forever Center, that corporation became the world's most powerful institution. Frost worked hard and did his job as an honest salaryman should, never doubting the Forever Center's mission. But after a confidential package is mistakenly routed to his desk, he suddenly finds himself on the run from hidden forces out to destroy him forever.
The standard "government conspiracy" type plot isn't exceptional, but I did love the world building and the speculation around the social implications of cryogenics. Simak also did a good job of fleshing out his bare bones story with a number of interesting subplots and vignette's that really added flavor to the book without distracting or overly bulking it up.
A short, enjoyable read, Why Call Them Back From Heaven? is a definite buy if you see it in a used bookstore. Unfortunately, it is currently out of print.
%A Simak, Clifford D. %T Why Call Them Back from Heaven? %I Mayflower Books %D 1967 %G ISBN N/A %P 191 pp. %O mass market paperback, US$0.60 (original list price)
Reviewed on 2001-01-07
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