Tomorrow And Tomorrow (Bantam Spectra Book)

Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Bantam Spectra Book)

A man from Earth's distant past is humanity's only hope for a future...Drake Merlin's wife, the love of his life, is dying of a rare, fatal disease for which there is no cure. Not now, in the 21st century. But surely in the future...For Drake there is only one solution: have Ana's body frozen until she can be cured. And he will go with her into the cryowomb. It is a desperate gamble born of folly, obsession...and love.Thus begins an epic journey across eons, as Drake is revived again and again, only to find that Ana is beyond help. Millions of years past his first sleep, he learns there is hope for her restoration--at the Omega Point, where the universe collapses, merging past and present. But first he will be awakened to become humanity's unwilling savior. For an alien menace is laying the solar system to waste, and only an anachronism from the days of human barbarism can save an enlightened race....From the Paperback edition. From Publishers Weekly Sheffield, who won the 1993 Nebula and 1994 Hugo awards for his novelette, Georgia on My Mind, fleshes out another piece of short fiction, At the Eschaton, to create this story of love's triumph over illness and mortality. The talented 21st-century composer Drake Merlin leads a seemingly charmed life; that is, until his wife, Ana, is stricken by a mysterious and incurable illness. Desperate, Merlin has his wife placed in cryostasis and sets about amassing a fortune to keep her there until a cure can be found. Then, like the Arthurian character for whom he's named, Merlin joins her prolonged sleep. The years pass, and while Merlin is awakened at various times?500 years later, to discover the solar system undergoing massive terraforming; then 20,000 years later?the news about his wife remains as bleak as ever. The future Sheffield envisions is fairly familiar, until Merlin awakens some 14 million years hence. Here, he sees the sun has burned down to red, and humanity has branched off into numerous subspecies capable of surviving in hostile environments. While this setting is truly alien, the reasons for Merlin's revival is a bit cliched?a docile humanity faces a terrifying enemy, and so Merlin's "primitive drive and aggression" is the last hope. The novel does not generate a consistently compelling narrative, in part because Merlin's love for his wife is portrayed as tender and sincere but lacks the passion that would motivate such heroics. Also given the sprawling canvas, Sheffield offers only tepid surprises. Sheffield, a mathematician and physicist by training, offers a laudable appendix discussing the scientific cornerstones of the novel. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal In The Billion Dollar Boy, rich, spoiled, overweight 15-year-old Shelby Cheever is bored, so he convinces his mother to take him on a space cruise. Without proper preparation, and drunk besides, he accesses the node network alone to visit the Kuiper asteroid belt and finds himself hurtled 27 light years out to the Messina Dust Cloud, where he is rescued by a mining family. On the three-month journey home, Shelby must learn how to do for himself in an environment where his wealth and pampered status mean nothing. Another well-written coming-of-age adventure story in the new Jupiter series. For large sf collections. In the hard-science Tomorrow & Tomorrow, Sheffield explores changes in the solar system and the theory of a closed vs. open system wrapped around a tale of a musician's fanatical love for his wife. Drake Merlin has his dying wife Ana and himself cryonically frozen so they can be together once a cure for her disease is found. Several times over 15 billion years he is awakened only to find no cure and, one time, he accidentally causes Ana's death. But if the theory of a closed system is true and the universe shrinks, he and Ana can return to a point when she is alive. This fascinating story is recommended for most sf collecti