The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [4]
It may be relevant at this point to note that although the series was always intended to run to six volumes it was conceived as two sets of three, although this pattern was disrupted by the fact that the books were not contracted for publication — and therefore not issued — in chronological order. The first three books were designed as earnest and relatively orthodox thrillers, whereas the remainder were designed as flamboyant comedies, whose mystery elements would be more obviously contrived.
The reasoning behind this scheme was born of the fear that as the world depicted in the series came gradually closer to a Utopian condition, stories set there would be robbed of most of the dramatic impetus that worlds far from the ideal provide in abundance. Utopian fiction has a notorious tendency to be boring, and the demands of melodrama have been a key factor in determining the preference which science fiction writers have for dealing in more or less horrible futures. My hope was that I could compensate for the melodramatic drain inherent in mapping an improving situation by switching to an alternative narrative currency. For bridging purposes, however, Volume four of the series, Architects of Emortality retains a calculatedly absurd murder-mystery framework in which a genetic engineer specializing in flower design named Oscar Wilde lends his expertise as an aesthetic theorist to the investigation by UN policepersons Charlotte Holmes and Hal Watson of a series of murders signed (pseudonymously) “Rappaccini.”
By 2495, when Architects of Emortality is set, the limitations of nanotechnological repair as a technology of longevity, even in combination with periodic rejuvenative somatic engineering treatments, have been conclusively shown up. All recent progress has been made in the field of genetically engineered longevity, which had gone through a long period of relative unfashionability as a result of the seemingly insuperable problem of the Miller Effect — although some further progress was made by courtesy of the continued efforts of such diehard adherents as the Ahasuerus Foundation. Another problematic side effect of longevity has also been publicized, although its existence and effects are dubious: the tendency of long-lived individuals to lose their mental adaptability.
The story told in Architects of Emortality takes place at a crucial historical juncture, when the last generation of humans who did not receive the longevity-providing Zaman Transformation at the single-cell stage of their development is approaching the limit of their endurance — the oldest of them routinely attaining a life span of 300 years, but not much more — and the first generation ZT beneficiaries are still young. No one knows, as yet, whether the members of the latest New Human Race are in danger of falling prey to robotization. One of the new breed of genetically enhanced emortals, a junior member of the still-thriving Hardinist Cabal named Michael Lowenthal, attaches himself to the Holmes/Watson investigation as an interested observer. He and Wilde become rivals in their attempts to construct hypothetical motives to rationalize Rappaccini’s murders. Although Wilde proves, in the end, to be the better interpreter, it is Lowenthal who actually reaps a profit — on behalf of his masters — by following the investigation to its astonishing conclusion.
The seemingly final conquest of death that is visible to the characters of Architects of Emortality is fully realized in volume five of the series, The Fountains of Youth. Unlike its predecessor and the present volume, The Fountains of Youth is a comedy bildungsroman rather than a comedic mystery story; it constitutes the autobiography of Mortimer Gray, a member of the New Human Race born in 2520.
When he writes his autobiography, in 3025, Mortimer still expects to live for several more centuries, if not millennia, but he thinks it worth producing a summary record of the first great