X-Message-Number: 1569
Date: 10 Jan 93 09:52:40 EST
From: "Steven B. Harris" <>
Subject: CRYONICS Not For the Hell Of It

Dear Folks:

   I was interested in John Eastmond's comments regarding
technological Hell being a result of cryonics, for it has a lot
of historical precedent.  I know that myself decided, about a
year after becoming a cryonicist, to write a rather gruesome SF
story involving a libertarian star-trader who encounters a planet
where fanatics with unlimited technology have (for religious
reasons) decided to create such a Hell for unbelievers.  I
suppose the place I must have been thinking of was the torture
pits of Rigel IV <g>.   What interests me is that the concept,
which I quite independently thought of as an SF theme, had not
only been invented before me, but a little historical searching
showed that it had invented LONG before me, and indeed was
CONSISTENTLY connected in fiction with cryonics.  Those who've
read my essays in cryonics have seem me list these before.  In
brief, the collection of stories which include technological
revival being connected with Hell include (at least):

1) The very FIRST story of such a thing, which is also a good
candidate for the first really good and true SF story: of course
Mary Shelly's 1819 Frankenstein. This is a tale of a recon-
structed being WHO DOES NOT AGE, and is subjected to abandonment
by his creator, and complete social isolation because of his
extreme ugliness.  Social Hell.  He is also cursed with an
intelligent and sensitive nature, and has to endure all this
while reading Goethe's Werther (boy, that's suffering).  The
monster ends up committing all sorts of atrocities in striking
back, flees to the arctic, and commits (so we are led to believe)
suicide.  Or intends to.  But maybe he just gets frozen again, to
come back in a block of ice in 1964 in the Hammer movie _The Evil
of Frankenstein_....

2) A Lovecraft story (Herbert West, Reanimator, 1922) in which
people reanimated from the dead are transformed into either moral
or physical monsters. 

3) The first recognizable cryonics story: Lovecraft's "Cool Air"
(1928) in which the scientist who has cryogenically preserved his
clinically dead body, must live a life of nearly total social
isolation while he watches himself decay and rot away very
slowly.  

4) The first story that suggests that immortality might be
possible by transplanting one's brain via high technology to a
different body: Edgar Rice Burroughs' novel _Mastermind of Mars_
(1925 or so).  But here some experimental subjects find their
brains half transplanted into apes (Island of Dr Morreau style)
and others find their bodies being organ-legged to richer people,
and they themselves transplanted into the decaying bodies of the
old and dying.  This is not eternal suffering, but it's not
exactly what we are all looking forward to, either.

6) The first story that suggests that immortality might be
possible by having one's brain mechanically transplanted into a
mechanical support device, Donovan's Brain style (Lovecraft
again, The Whisperer in Darkness (1930).  But this is done by
Earthmen by aliens from Pluto, who kidnap Earth brains away to
far planets for medical experiments.  These brains don't have mo-
bility, and (unlike Donovan) are utterly helpless.

7) The first cryonics story in which a cryonically preserved
person is brought back to life, again by transplanting his brain
in to a robot to make him immortal: Jones' 1931 story "The
Jameson Satellite."  I suspect Jones of being a Lovecraft fan. 
In any case, Jones has a sequence in which his robot hero is
buried alive, and finds himself facing the prospect of being
totally immobilized, unable to sense or communicate, and unable
to die.  Forever.  Yuk.  He gets out of it eventually (and by a
not very convincing means), but the issue does come up in the
story.

8) The first cryonics SF story (The Penultimate Trump, 1948) to
suggest the full cryonics idea, but suggesting deliberate
freezing for the purpose of future revival by human technology,
written by the father of cryonics Robert C. W. Ettinger himself.
This story has a plot that explicitly deals with the first 
cryonicist (a rich scoundrel) who is revived in the far future,
and then sent to the torture pits of Mars (now renamed Hell) to
pay for crimes which he had himself unwillingly confessed to
while during the revival.  Pretty explicit.  All our brains
record a record of our sins, do they not?  And don't even know
what the future regards as sins.

9)  Larry Niven's tale of the corpsicle which begins _A World Out
of Time_, in which the frozen protagonist is revived in basically
a version of Orwell's 1984, and escapes only by means of the most
improbable of mechanisms.  Not too optimistic.  Niven hasn't
signed up for cryonics, either....

10) A recent TV movie (sorry, I forget the name) which has a
person brought back as head only, and stuck in a box, alive and
aware, to basically rot intellectually.  This the writer's guild
response to the Dora Kent case, of course.


   I hope it is clear from the above that the idea and pos-
sibility of technical Hell as product of technical resurrection
in general, and cryonics in particular, is not just an idea
recently occurred, but that indeed it is closely bound up in the
basic human emotional response to the idea of resurrection
without religious approval.  Cryonics involves isolation and
alienation from one's social mileau to some extent, both now and
later, and this terrifies people.  I am particularly fond of the
ideal of Pascal's Wager as a metaphor for cryonics gamble (in
fact, so far as I can tell, I am the first person, in an article
for Free Inquiry Magazine in 1989, to draw this analogy), but I
will admit that at that time I did not see the full implications,
in terms of the negative payoff matrix for the decision.  Now I
realize that the biggest reason why most people who are informed
of cryonics don't sign up, is not because they believe it will
work, but because they are afraid that it will!!  Getting beyond
this horrible idea requires fully as much working though of one's
anxiety as the poor protagonist of Joyce's _Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man_ (a book I recommend-- read the sermon in
it).  How I got though this, I cannot tell, but I suppose that I
inevitably came to believe from my psycholocal studies that what
is much (not all) of the human will-to-cruelly is a response of
deprivation in childhood, and that technology is making this more
and more rare.  Presumably, any future rich enough to provide
nanotechnology is going to have raised nearly all people with a
rich and nurturing environment, free from much of the horrible
neglects that occur today.  I think that folks will be then, if
not saints, at least not monsters.  As nice a people as you and
me; and I wouldn't put a grasshopper in eternal Hell, let alone a
fellow human being (for any reason).  This comfort and reason to
take courage is the best I can muster, but I can report that it
is enough.  Everyone who works through this must find something
or some idea of the sort.


                                          Steve Harris




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