Today’s book: Fountains of Youth

The third book in Brian Stableford’s trilogy, The Fountains of Youth, carries forward the story of humanity’s evolution into the New Human Race. This novel is posed as the autobiography of Mortimer Grey, or at least the first 500 years of it, as Grey can hope to live several times that long at least; his life is unavoidably wrapped up in his monumental, 10 volume History of Death. While Stableford paints a vivid portrait of human society over the 500 years the novel spans, he really uses this opportunity in order to give us a new philosophical overview of real history seen as the battle of humans to come to terms with death. “The only true enemy,” as he puts it. A good read for those who enjoy intellectual adventures and speculations and, don’t worry, even though humanity seems to have death beaten, the author comes up with a closer that dashes that hope (and leaves open the possibility of another book).