The Fountains of Youth

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Credibly written but lacking in emotional range, this third installment in Stableford's Living in the Future series imagines a time when most humans--nearly immortal--aren't much preoccupied with the subject of death. Born more than five centuries ago, in 2520, Mortimer Gray is an emortal, a sturdy genetic composite who was raised in the Himalayas by the standard group of eight adults. These days, unlike most of his contemporaries, Gray--who long ago discovered his potential mortality when he barely survived a massive underwater volcanic eruption--is obsessed with death, and in fact has undertaken a massive study of how human's ideas about it have affected history. Well before completing the work, several centuries and nine volumes later, he became both famous as a popular scholar and notorious as an influence on the Thanaticists, militant believers in keeping death a part of the human condition to the point of organizing ritual suicides and creating "recreational diseases." (Meanwhile, Gray's world has remained in flux--experiments are turning humans into cyborgs or genetically altered beings with four hands; interstellar probes have encountered intelligent aliens.) Gray is in some ways a fine narrator, able to reflect on the events circling around him with a historian's critical eye--but because he's rather detached, it's hard to get involved in his story. Moreover, Stableford has written much of this book as if he was composing a literary essay (complete with excessive foreshadowing)--which makes reading it a bit of a chore.