SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

A stylish but slender time-travel/immortality yarn, from the veteran author of, most recently, the story collection The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party (1984). From the 1980s, Charles Phillips is transported to an unrecognizably distant future, where a small, faceless, childlike population of immortals have re-created, in intricate, authentic detail, five great cities from previous epochs, with android servants, ""temporaries,"" as inhabitants. Free from all concerns, the immortals explore the cities, drifting in a timeless, aimless social whirl. And for variety, robots at intervals will tear down one of the five cities and re-create another. Phillips, with only non-specific memories of his era to guide him, goes along with the idea; he falls in love with Gioia, who is different from the other immortals: she's more hurried and impulsive, less at ease socially. He learns that she's an atavism, a mortal like himself--and, when she visibly starts to age, she leaves him to go on a last desperate fling. Then Phillips is told that he is himself a construct, a superior, immortal ""temporary""--and part of the immortals' entertainment package! So Gioia has a choice: she can die--or become a construct too. Elegant but superficial, and too thin all around to satisfy as a novel.