Don DeLillo has always been something more than a novelist. Such was the ambition and acuity of his novels of the Eighties and Nineties – White Noise, Libra, Mao II, Underworld – that he acquired the reputation of postmodern seer, his pen a dowsing rod for the submerged terrors and desires of late capitalist America. Since the turn of the millennium his work has become more ascetic and abstract but still concerned with picking out the ominous hum beneath the complacent noise of contemporary culture.
So it is surprising to find that in Zero K, his 16th novel written in his 80th year, DeLillo has chosen a subject that became a convention of science fiction in the Twenties and Thirties: cryonic suspension. When Robert Ettinger read those speculative stories he saw the future. In 1964, with The Prospect of Immortality, he made the case for the scientific validity of cryonics and a strange industry was born. Three years later the first person was cryogenically frozen. MORE
So it is surprising to find that in Zero K, his 16th novel written in his 80th year, DeLillo has chosen a subject that became a convention of science fiction in the Twenties and Thirties: cryonic suspension. When Robert Ettinger read those speculative stories he saw the future. In 1964, with The Prospect of Immortality, he made the case for the scientific validity of cryonics and a strange industry was born. Three years later the first person was cryogenically frozen. MORE
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