Some people consider James Bedford the world's longest-surviving person. In 1967, at the age of 73, the psychology professor stopped breathing at a nursing home in Los Angeles. But in the hours that followed, a medical team performed the first successful cryonic suspension, using ice to freeze Bedford's body before placing him in a capsule filled with liquid nitrogen. Bedford's family stayed vigilant to ensure he never thawed, at one time stashing him in a garage-sized storage locker they rented in Burbank. Twice a month, they paid a truck to top off Bedford's container with liquid nitrogen.
Bedford is now in the care of the nonprofit Alcor Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. The largest cryonics organization in the world, it currently holds 146 patients---52 frozen whole bodies and 94 frozen brains---including baseball hall-of-famer Ted Williams and Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney. Alcor's president, Max More, was there the day Bedford's body was transferred into one of the state-of-the-art storage pods. "The original ice around his body was still intact," More says. The technology to reanimate Bedford---and cure him of the cancer that caused his health to deteriorate---has not been developed. Yet More's team believes that the part of his brain that makes him human has been preserved. So they hope, and they wait.
Don DeLillo's latest novel, Zero K, puts forth a much surer---and darker---vision of the future. In his book, cryonics enables the superrich to "live the billionaire's myth of immortality" on an exclusive desert commune in southeast Kazakhstan, waiting until they can be successfully reanimated. We're not in Arizona anymore.
DeLillo, a National Book Award winner and "chief shaman of the paranoid school of American Fiction," has trod his share of dystopian landscapes in his 15 previous novels. His plots include kidnappings, hijackings, secretive war cabals, and the search for Hitler porn. But he seems to have loaded an even more oppressive shade of black into the typewriter (and he really does use a typewriter, according to his Paris Review interview) for his assessment of the existential threat posed by cryonic philanthropists.
Jeff Lockhart, Zero K's narrator, travels to the commune---known as the Convergence---where his stepmother, Artis, is preparing for cryopreservation. Ross, Jeff's father, is a billionaire investor, and one of a group of wealthy benefactors who funded the Convergence, and a subpar dad: he was occupied with moneymaking concerns for much of Jeff's childhood. He pretends he can't even remember the name of his first wife, Jeff's mother. He calls their marriage the only thing he's ever second-guessed. He asks to be reminded where he was when she died. "You were on the cover of Newsweek," Jeff says.
Jeff's anger for his father intensifies when Ross decides to undergo cryonic suspension with Artis, despite being in good health. Ultimately, though, Ross reneges on his commitment as Artis is dying; he and Jeff fly home to their lives in New York, and Ross grapples with his decision for much of the remaining book.
The relationship between Jeff and Ross, and the aftermath of Ross' decision, serves as the starting point for an extended argument against cryonics. But DeLillo's screed is founded on a straw man: by making cryonics the ploy of a rich, insensitive elitist, it becomes difficult for the reader to separate their dislike of Ross from enmity for the technology.
That conflation gives DeLillo occasion to pile on criticisms. Cryonics is "designing a future culture of lethargy and self-indulgence"; it's "easing the way toward uncontrollable levels of population, environmental stress."
The warnings go on and on. "A religion of death will emerge in response to our prolonged lives," one character says. "Bands of death rebels will set out to kill people at random."
DeLillo's primary argument against cryonics is that it robs us of our essential humanity. Mannequin imagery recurs throughout the novel, reinforcing a sense of lost individuality. Jeff enters a garden at the Convergence where he finds a pit of mannequins---"men and women stripped of identity." Later, he returns to the cryonic chambers to view the preserved bodies. "It occurred to me that these were humans as mannequins," he says. "I allowed myself to think of them as brainless objects."
This argument from the loss of humanity would have more credence if DeLillo hadn't taken such pains to rob some of his own central characters of their humanity. A materialistic absentee father like Ross cannot lose his human spirit when the author never gives him one to begin with. There's soul in the stories of real people like James Bedford---and his family's struggle---but not nearly enough of it in DeLillo's novel.
At its worst, Zero K tends toward a lazy technophobia that's all too common in the works of lesser novelists. "There is a smartphone that has an app that counts the steps a person takes," he writes as Jeff. "I did my own count, day by day, stride for stride, into the tens of thousands." It's opposition to technology as defined by technology: a pointless pissing match between man and machine. The ability to tally one's own steps only matters because an app does the same.
While DeLillo may not have the most insightful things to say about your smartphone, however, there's still a lot of beautiful writing to appreciate in Zero K. DeLillo returns to some of the recurring obsessions---belief systems, how language forms consciousness, the interplay between media and personal experience---that he explored more fully in novels like The Names and White Noise. Those just picking up DeLillo for the first time, in fact, are probably best served heading straight to those earlier works, while more dedicated readers will enjoy Zero K for the latest on DeLillo's enduring themes.
There are about 300 people in the world under cryonic suspension, according to Alcor president Max More's estimate. It's a surprisingly low number, considering the alternatives for anyone who doesn't believe in an afterlife. While economies of scale should help lower the financial costs, cryonics still has major hurdles in public perception to overcome.
"It doesn't help that almost all science fiction is dystopian," More says of culture's general pessimism about living in the future. More and his team try to change that when they can. They consult frequently with science fiction writers and on TV shows, including Bones and NCIS.
More says he received no call from DeLillo, though. Based on DeLillo's view of cryonics, it's also safe to say that none of the Zero K book advance went toward the author's cryopreservation. But More knows that one of the beautiful things in life, as in fiction, is that people can change. He's had patients who decided to be frozen just before their life---their natural life---came to an end.
