The First Immortal - Tapa dura

When physician Benjamin Smith wakes up eighty-three years in the future--in the year 2071--after a cryonic sleep, he finds that although humankind has mastered cloning and eternal youth, emotional and ethical predicaments are still prevalent

ishing first novel, James L. Halperin wrote of humanity's epoch-making achievement of truth and justice at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Now Halperin takes his luminous vision a leap further into the future as he unfolds this magnificent saga of our triumph over death itself.

At the age of sixty-three, Benjamin Smith, accomplished physician, loving father and grandfather, brilliantly original thinker, is in the prime of his life. He is too vital, too gifted, to die of the massive heart attack that overwhelms his system on a rain-soaked spring day in 1988.

But Ben Smith will not die. A pioneering advocate of the infant science of cryonics, Ben has arranged to have his body frozen until the day when humanity will possess the knowledge, the technology, and the courage to revive him.

That day arrives far more quickly--and far more strangely--than anyone could possibly imagine. For when Ben resumes life after a frozen interval of eighty-three years, the world