Subject: Review: Inherit the Earth by Brian Stableford

From: [email-masked] (SFRevu)
Date: 12 Nov 1998 14:35:20 -0500

Inherit the Earth by Brian Stableford 
	Review Copyright 1998 by Ernest Lilley

Damon Hart is one of the first generation born in the artificial wombs
developed by Conrad Heiler after the global fertility crisis peaked and
mankind's future came to a grinding halt. He's Heiler's biological son,
and the foster son of Silas Arnett and Eveline Hywood. Swimming in denial,
he changed his name, struck out on his own as an exhibition streetfighter
making sensory tapes for audiences that can relive every bit of bloodlust
and -letting in the safety of their VR hoods. Of course, he's past that
now, making a living and a new reputation as a commercial VR artist while
copying friends and lovers into cyber-porn and editing out everything but
the meat.

Silas Arnett is an old man in a young body maintained by IT, nanobeasties
swimming in his blood, taking care of all the little details of biology,
from the suppression of pain to the enhancement of Eros. Silas is a living
fossil.  He's a left-over from before the fertility crisis that threatened
to wipe man off the face of the Earth in a single generation. Once he was
a researcher with Conrad Heiler, one of the team that developed the
technology of the artificial womb. Now he's retired - wealthy, self-
indulgent, sleeping with an endless stream of genuinely young women in
Brian Stableford's Brave New World.

Until he's kidnapped, purged of his IT, publicly denounced and tortured
for all the world to watch on the Net. All to give Damon a message. Conrad
Heiler, once the hero of humanity, didn't really die. He's alive, and
guilty of crimes against humanity - find him and we'll let your foster
father live. Yeah, like Damon really cares.

INHERIT THE EARTH follows Damon as he searches back through the personal
past he'd tried to bury to find the truth about his father. He spends a
lot of time zipping around the New World tracking down his elusive
progenitor and getting kidnapped by the various players in the game as he
keeps getting his nose rubbed in his own self-importance.

The action, and there's a fair amount of it, contrives to tie together the
book's real context, a discussion of the tensions threatening to rip
society apart as the race steps onto the escalator of immortality. If no
one ever dies, exactly how do you inherit the earth?

Among the current crop of cyberstories dealing with life extension, from
Gibson's IDORU to James Halperin's FIRST IMMORTAL, the questions posed and
the technologies explored in Stableford's novel are its strengths. The
plot moves along reasonably, but the central character is disconnected
enough from everyone around him that the story never quite catches
fire. As hard SF it works fairly well, but the character's journey from
dissociation to involvement falls short of compelling.

%T Inherit the Earth
%A Brian Stableford 
%G ISBN 0-312-86493-0
%I Tor Hrdcvr
%D Sep-98