Emortality

This is a science fiction novel of enormous scope, filled with wonders. Set earlier in the same "future history" as Inherit the Earth, Architects of Emortality, and The Fountains of Youth, The Cassandra Complex is the independent story of events crucial to the creation of the universe in which the others take place. It is the twenty-first century, a world of rapid change and biotech threats and promises. World War Three, the biotech war, is on the horizon and the world, as we know it is going to end. The fateful question is, who is going to choose the kind of future that will follow, and who gets to live in this new world to come? Lisa Frieman, a forensic researcher working for the police, is attacked in her apartment. Jordan Miller, a distinguished scientist with whom Lisa once worked, has disappeared with a secret discovery. But, what has he discovered that everyone wants? And, why do the thieves, and their remote masters, think that Lisa has any knowledge of the secret Miller guards? Profound scientific extrapolation combined with riveting suspense make this at once a futuristic thriller and a cutting-edge SF novel. The Cassandra Complex expands the scope of Brian Stableford's growing future history and adds another major accomplishment to his long list of triumphant creations.

In the twenty-second century, biomedical nanotechnology has given everyone in the world long life and robust health. It is the New Utopia, and all live in the expectation that true immortality will soon be realized. Damon Hart, son of the scientist responsible for much of the wonders of the new world, would rather forget his famous father and get on with his own life. But a shadowy terrorist group forces Damon to confront his heritage, launching a cat-and-mouse game that pits Damon against the terrorists, Interpol, and the powerful corporations that control the biotechnology of the future...a game Damon is ill-equipped to survive. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

This is a science fiction novel of enormous scope and ambition, filled with wonders that expands Brian Stableford's on-going future history series. Hundreds of years in the future, further ahead than the settings of Inherit the Earth and Architects of Emortality, Mortimer Gray is born into a world where he can potentially live forever. But, after a traumatic natural disaster that kills millions, Gray devotes the next five-hundred years of his life to the study of death and its effects on human civilization, viewed from a post-death perspective. Through it all we see the broad, large-scale accumulation of change and the growth of humanity on Earth and out to the stars as Gray experiences his boundless lifetime.

Now, in Architects of Emortality, Stableford gives us a story set hundreds of years in the future, filled with people who can hope for 300-year lifespans and a fortunate few whose lives will be in the thousands of years. This society is on the edge of radical change, where people have the time to develop eccentric lifestyles and personal obsessions, a world sometimes reminiscent of the distant future of Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time series. And, there has been a series of murders that threaten the future stability of the world, murders executed by bioengineered flowers. Police officers Watson and Holmes investigate, but the central figure quickly becomes the amateur detective Oscar Wilde, a student of history who has taken on the persona of his namesake. And, the question is not so much who the murderer is, but how and why. Filled with memorable characters and powerful and striking images of the richly altered world of the future, Architects of Emortality is a satisfying and complete story that also adds depth and detail to the evolving series.

Hundreds of years in our future, humanity is expanding out into the galaxy in gigantic colony ships. Slower than light speed, the ships are filled with long-lived people who are, nevertheless, in suspended animation for all or much of the voyage. One ship has reached a promising world and begun a colony, but not everyone has yet been awakened. Matthew Fleury is shocked to learn that he has been revived from suspended animation to replace a colleague who has been murdered. Is the planet still inhabited by the alien race that left ancient ruins of great cities? And, who killed the eminent scientist leading the investigation of the ruins? If the aliens survive, then the planet becomes off limits to humans, and the ship must find another planet to colonize. There are some colonists who would kill to leave. And, some who would kill to stay.

Stableford has mapped out for us in engaging stories the wonderful and sometimes disturbing world of the next thousand-years, on Earth, throughout the solar system, and to worlds beyond, with emphasis on huge sociological changes and extraordinary alterations in the biological life of humans. It is one of the most detailed and plausible and fascinating projections in all of science fiction. Now, in The Omega Expedition, it takes us into another millennium, and is complete. The Omega Expedition is a philosophical novel, a sequel to The Fountains of Youth. It is the extraordinary life history of Adam Zimmerman, developer of the technology of emortality. The main part of the narrative describes his long-delayed awakening into the 35th century, a time of true immortals. His exotic hosts-inhabitants of a micro world in the outer solar system-have recruited various interested parties to help with the resurrection project, one of whom (inevitably) is the famous historian of death, the immortal Mortimer Gray, who is exceedingly anxious to gain what insight he can into the vagaries of the mortal mind. The Omega Expedition is a richly textured, serious SF novel that will resound like a huge bell, ringing down the halls of science fiction for years to come.