X-Message-Number: 32367
Subject: Review of the unincorporated man
Date: Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:40:55 -0500
From: 

----------MB_8CC75CF40D7985B_EB4_146CF_webmail-d035.sysops.aol.com



I promised this review several months ago, but I was waiting for it to be 
published in Cryonics magazine first.  That's done, so here it is.

Steve Bridge
******************



The unincorporated man by dani kollin and eytan kollin.   Tor Books, 2009
One of the hardest books to write must be the "cryonics novel."

There are not many really good cryonics novels, perhaps not any that would be 
considered among the all-time great futuristic books.  If you write a novel 
about cryonics, your choices are limited.  You are pretty much stuck with 
variations on 1.  Guy gets frozen.  2.  Guy gets revived.   The future is 
different.  3.  Guy gets attacked and doesn't know why.  4.  Guy figures out 
future and gets the girl.  Probably the best of these is still Age of the 
Pussyfoot by Frederik Pohl, written way back in 1969.  (Robert Heinlein's 
popular The Door Into Summer (1956) is really more a time travel book than a 
cryonics book.)

Then there is a variation where most of the problems are in the "before getting 
suspended" part of the story.  The writer can concentrate on today's world and 
today's human motivations, and write a mystery or suspense drama.  Successful 
variations on this include The First Immortal by James Halperin (1998) and 
Chiller by Sterling Blake (pseudonym of Gregory Benford) (1993).  

There are also many novels which merely use cryonics as a tool to save the hero 
or get the hero to the future, where the real themes of the book can be played 
out.  My favorite "save the hero" story is the Hugo Award-winning Mirror Dance 
by Lois McMaster Bujold.   My favorite "get the hero to the future" tale is now 
...  the unincorporated man (the lack of capital letters is intentional on the 
part of the authors) by brothers Dani and Eytan Kollin.  The brothers are public
cryonicists (Cryonics Institute) but have not written a "cryonics novel."  
There is no explanation of cryonics technology or justification for its use, 
beyond its being an accepted life-saving technology in the future.  Instead, 
this is a political novel, obviously inspired by Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand, 
among others.

Justin Cord is a wealthy, inventive, terminally-ill genius (very Heinlein) from 
today who doesn't trust the current cryonics companies.  He arranges to have 
himself placed in suspension in a self-sustaining storage unit and buried in a 
cave under a mountain.  Stretching plausibility, he is discovered about 300 
years in the future by a mine explorer and revived.  And boy, is the world 
different.

The Kollins have developed an extremely well thought-out future, based on an 
idea by economist Milton Friedman from his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom.  
This quote from Friedman leads off the book, "The counterpart for education 
(financing) would be to "buy' a share in an individual's earning prospects; to 
advance him the funds needed to finance his training on condition that he agree 
to pay the lender a specified part of his future earnings.  There seems no legal
obstacle to private contracts of this kind, even though they are economically 
equivalent to the purchase of a share in an individual's earning capacity and 
thus to partial slavery."

In this future, the world economy and society in general had long before 
experienced a complete meltdown.  Large corporations took over most of the 
functions of government, and Western civilization, at least, worked by each 
individual being a public corporation.  At birth, each person is assigned a 
number of shares of stock in him or herself.  The government owns some, and the 
parents own some; but some a person can sell to pay for his education, training,
or capital to start a business.  The better one's future earnings prospects 
are, the more expensive the stock.  If the person does well in life, he might 
even be able to buy back many of his shares.  This system is stable and 
understandable.  Yes, there are still less successful people and some who feel 
trapped by the system; but the world as a whole is calm and the economy 
generally works well.  

Justin Cord is the only survivor from the 21st Century.  The cryonics companies 
were destroyed in the collapse of society, with a loss of all patients, although
a reformed version of suspended animation is commonplace in this future.  (For 
the sake of the fiction, I forgive the brothers for killing us all off.  It's 
not much worse than Gregory Benford did in Chiller, where a serial killer 
murders the dynamic young CEO of a cryonics organization - published a couple of
months after I became the dynamic young CEO of Alcor.  "Chiller," indeed.)

Cord was not born into the personal corporation system, so no one quite knows 
how to handle him.  Most people assume that his earnings potential is huge, as 
the only living representative of the 21st Century Dark Ages.  Everyone wants a 
corporate piece of him.  But Cord is a libertarian and refuses to become 
incorporated, believing that he would be ceding control of his life to others.  
Forced to justify his position in court, Cord speaks out to the world and 
advocates rebellion against the system.   (Justin Cord = John Galt?)

The Kollins' future is worked out in great detail, with many levels, unlike the 
lazy one-dimensional futures that populate many SF novels.  They are a bit hazy 
on what happened to the Third World countries; but no one can get everything 
into one novel.  The characterization is better than in most Heinlein novels.  
For example the ostensible villain of the piece has several layers and surprises
to him, and is so well-done that there are times that the reader wonders if he 
will turn out to be one of the good guys instead.  The female psychiatrist who 
takes on Cord's case is well portrayed as a believable individual.  This ability
to create characters bodes well for future novels by these writers.  On the 
other hand, the romance that pushes part of the plot forward is awkward and the 
one sex scene is clumsy.  (Will somebody please find these guys some 
girlfriends?)

Just as cryonics novels can be boring and one dimensional, novels about grand 
political and social ideas like freedom, responsibility, libertarianism, 
communism, etc. can turn into a series of self-satisfied and self-approved 
lectures, with the author's particular point of view being promoted as the truth
as obvious as the "revealed truth" of some religions.  Thankfully, the Kollins 
have given us story about humans dealing with the consequences of these ideas, 
with doubt, confusion, and tension between various ideas.  Messier than a 
polemic but a hundred times more interesting.

Actually, BOTH versions of the future (the incorporated mainstream and the 
libertarian rebellion proposed by Justin Cord) are so convincingly argued by the
various characters that this reader bounced back and forth trying to decide 
which was better.  Easy solutions are boring.  It made me wonder if each brother
chose a side in the writing of the book in order to argue them so thoroughly.  
That would be an interesting way to co-write a book and provide tension.   

I have some other quibbles.  The ending of the book seems kind of messy and 
indistinct - hmm, like a lot of Heinlein books.  Also, and perhaps this is 
inevitable in an SF novel, the authors seem so convinced that their knowledge 
and philosophy of today is obviously correct that their main character (or maybe
they themselves?) could go 300 years in the future and straighten everyone out,
as if no one had learned anything new in 3 centuries.  The arrogance is the 
same as exhibited by writers who send their characters BACK in time hundreds of 
years to teach everyone what right manners, morals, and politics are.

And I regret that the writers did not better pursue a very important moral issue
about Justin Cord's libertarian approach.  As I understand the libertarian 
ideal, the individual should be able to control his own life and make whatever 
choices he wants, as long as those choices do not take away anyone else's 
personal control and choices.  Of course, quite a few of our desired choices 
could harm others or take their own freedom.  That fuzzy line could be the 
subject of a whole series of novels, like Isaac Asimov explored the consequences
of the Three Laws of Robotics and how they were often in conflict.

Justin Cord's rebellion harms the personal fortunes and the very lives of 
billions of people, and even as he begins to understand this, he pursues his 
direction without much regret or moral reflection.  I think there was an even 
bigger and better book here if that moral struggle could have been brought out.

Still, Dani and Eytan Kollin have succeeded admirably at writing a book of ideas
which also completely holds our attention as a novel.  This should be 
entertaining and thought-provoking for anyone who sees this review.  I borrowed 
this book from the public library (I'm a librarian, after all); but I think I'll
have to buy a copy for my personal library.  You should, too.
 

----------MB_8CC75CF40D7985B_EB4_146CF_webmail-d035.sysops.aol.com

 Content-Type: text/html; charset="utf-8"

[ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] 

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=32367