The First Immortal

In his astonishing first novel, James L. Halperin wrote of humanity's epoch-making achievement of truth and justice at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Now Halperin takes his luminous vision a leap further into the future as he unfolds this magnificent saga of our triumph over death itself. At the age of sixty-three, Benjamin Smith, accomplished physician, loving father and grandfather, brilliantly original thinker, is in the prime of his life. He is too vital, too gifted, to die of the massive heart attack that overwhelms his system on a rain-soaked spring day in 1988. But Ben Smith will not die. A pioneering advocate of the infant science of cryonics, Ben has arranged to have his body frozen until the day when humanity will possess the knowledge, the technology, and the courage to revive him. That day arrives far more quickly--and far more strangely--than anyone could possibly imagine. For when Ben resumes life after a frozen interval of eighty-three years, the world is altered beyond recognition. Thanks to the cutting-edge science of nanotechnology, as practiced by Ben's brilliant great-grandson, Trip Crane III, eternal youth, beauty, and good health are universally available. And the perfection of cloning gives humanity the godlike power to recreate living beings from a single cell. As one by one, Ben's mother, children, even a semblance of his beloved wife return to life in the mid-twenty-first century, the Smiths experience a complex reunion that reaches across and through generations. But as they marvel at the miracles of future science, Ben and his family will come to realize that the deepest ethical and emotional dilemmas of humankind--and of their own entangled lives--remain unsolved.