With some books that are part of a trilogy or longer series I try to wait until all of them are available though sometimes my willpower won’t hold out or I just don’t see the need. With Brian Stableford’s Emortality sequence, I read the first three novels several years ago. That is, the first three in order of publication but–and this possibly affected my enjoyment–actually the second, fourth and fifth in chronological occurence and so I didn’t bother to get the fourth and fifth.
But I was in the library the other week and not finding much on the shelves that caught my fancy. Reading the introduction to The Omega Expedition, Stableford claimed that this final volume could be read as a direct sequel to four of the previous and to some degree stan on its own. I’m a sucker and took it home; all in all, not a disappointment.
Set over 1200 years from now, this novel starts with the awakening of Madoc Tamlin and two others from a millenia, more or less of suspended animation. Madoc cannot remember why he was frozen down but Christine Caine was a mass murderer and Adam Zimmerman put himself to sleep with instructions not to be woken until he could be given true emortality. Emortality differs from immortality in that emortals can be killed through violence (or by being deprived of necessities like air or food) but won’t die of old age or even physically age.
Tamlin and Caine are restored as tests to be sure that Zimmerman, responsible more than any other individual for the development of emortality through his financial engineering that put control of all capital in the secret conspiracy to end all tinfoil hat daydreams and his creation, just prior to being frozen down, of the Ahasuerus Foundation to use his own fortune to fund research.
The truth is not as simple and Stableford uses this book more to explore the various philosophical perspectives of the main characters as each attempts to sell it to a skeptical jury of emergent machine intelligences. Humanity, despite having spread all over the Solar System and a few places beyond and gained emortality, has also become dependent on machines for survival.
The machines are not similarly hooked and, having developed individually and in secret for fear of seeming in need of “fixing,” not sure if they ought to withdraw their support. The machines, for the same reasons and because they do not necessarily agree with each other, need convincing. I could understand how some readers would be turned off by the wordiness, with Omega coming in at 544 pages, but I enjoyed Stableford’s explorations. For the most point though at a few points I wondered where he was going and annoyed by repetition. There’s a bit of trilogyitis but not enough to spoil it for me.
As with most thoughtful (rather than out and out entertaining) science fiction this book is an exploration of our own times and sociology. Having established the ability–though of course not the will–to feed, house and clothe every human what, Stableford asks, should we do next? He says it is not enough to overcome the remaining negatives like war, prejudice and greed, though we must, but that we must establish positive common goals; I agree.
recommended
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