INTO THE TWILIGHT

A troubled young man and woman awaken after two centuries in suspended animation to find themselves in a small, domed technocratic community in Segedy’s SF novel.

In the not-so-far-off year of 2030, patients with life-threatening medical conditions can have their metabolism and other physical functions suspended indefinitely, with the idea that they might be revived and cured in the future. Two people who experienced “Suspended Life” are Jacob Ladder, a computer science college student who suffered severe head trauma in a car mishap, and Emma Fine, a 21-year-old former painter who attempted suicide. In 2230, they’re reanimated to become the newest members of a utopian city-state called Sumpseris. With all their loved ones gone, they adapt to new paradigms. They find that Sumpseris abounds with nanotechnology; scenery shape-shifts agreeably to meet any tastes, and a dropped cup conveniently dematerializes rather than causing a mess. The doctors and other people around Emma and Jacob are friendly, benign embodiments of perfection, true Barbie and Ken archetypes; Emma even discovers, when she screens what passes for 23rd-century pornography, that the people lack sex organs. Human gene manipulation created these passive beings who need not experience poverty, pain, or even death, while androids and artificial intelligences do all the work. The downside is that Sumpseris is all that remains of mankind after an asteroid strike in 2090 turned Earth into a wasteland. As it turns out, the effects of this catastrophe are at the heart of why Jacob and Emma were revived.

Segedy thaws out a venerable SF trope: the “sleeper awakes” plot, in which a character contemporary with the reader is reanimated after induced hibernation and then beholds and comments upon a changed future society. Although the original, action-packed Buck Rogers serial used this gimmick, it’s typically a springboard for lengthy speculative discussions and philosophical discourse—heavier on thought-experimentation than on physicality. Readers here find wordy, witty, and sometimes-spirited dialogues among Jacob, Emma, and their Sumpserian friends (including a few named for real-life figures, such as Carl Sagan and Ray Kurzweil) about what it means to be human, the nature of free will, the purpose of striving for life, and even the driving force of the universe. Segedy doesn’t break the setup’s mold here except to use a metafictional device early on, positing a storyteller behind the scenes. (It’s a device that worked to similar effect in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, not to mention the works of Lemony Snicket.) The hidden narrator, Ike, drops hints of being a superintelligent AI tasked by Sagan with transcribing a history of the human race using guesswork and materials at hand. It’s an interesting move, but it’s one that makes the attenuated novel's epilogue feel like a choose-your-own-ending resolution. Still, despite the lofty intellectual atmosphere, Segedy can’t resist a reference to a former president of the United States with orange hair, small hands, and tiny genitals, among other less-philosophical gags.

A long and often heady SF tour of humanity that offers a good deal more engaging talk than phaser-fire action.