A world out of time
by Larry Niven · first published 1976
28% recommend72% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Science fiction about a cryogenically preserved man revived on a ruined, overheated Earth, his memories transplanted into a new body. The premise and plot device are enjoyable, making for a great read.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Jaybee Corbell awoke after more than 200 years as a corpsicle -- in someone else\'s body, and under sentence of instant annihilation if he made a wrong move while they were training him for a one-way mission to the stars. <BR>But Corbell picked his time and made his own move. Once he was outbound, where the Society that ruled Earth could not reach him, he headed his starship toward the galactic core, where the unimaginable energies of the Universe wrenched the fabric of time and space and promised final escape from his captors. <BR>Then he returned to an Earth eons older than the one he\'d lef
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Larry Niven has a few e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_World_Out_of_Time but I agree that realistic interstellar travel is more often found in older fiction, as we did not yet know how hard it was. What would be realistic now?
on “Study: 1960 ramjet design for interstellar travel—a sci-fi staple—is unfeasible” ↗Also, A World Out of Time, by Larry Niven - where a ramjet pilot returns to earth, only to find it ruined and way too hot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_World_Out_of_Time
on “US scientists find potentially habitable planet near Earth” ↗…material that could extend into space. To read an entertaining work of fiction that deals with these issues I suggest Larry Niven’s Known Space series, specifically as regards the Puppeteer planet, and his World Out of Time book with extreme engineering solutions to climate changes.
on “Waste heat will boil the oceans in about 400 years” ↗For another take on life-after-upload, try Neal Stephenson's "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell". [Edit] Also, Niven's "A World out of Time" [1], where the reanimated ('corpsicles') are used for menial / dangerous tasks. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_World_Out_of_Time
on “200 Frozen Heads and Bodies Await Revival at This Arizona Cryonics Facility” ↗Larry Niven's "A World Out of Time" had this as a plot device, when he wrote it in the 70s. I enjoyed the book a lot, a lot of hard-sci-fi readers did not.
on “Is Saturn a failed gas giant?” ↗I recommend Larry Niven's "World out of Time" in which the (cryogenically preserved) protagonist's memories are implanted in a new body by a future government. Great book.
on “Should you freeze your brain? These scientists think it's worth a shot” ↗In Larry Niven's A World Out of Time (1976), a human mind is uploaded to a computer, and finds himself running an interstellar spacecraft. Since he has to be awake for centuries, he comes up with a trick. He writes a virus to erase all…
on “Scott Adams: The Heady Thrill of Having Nothing to Do” ↗"Believe it or not, this was known 5 years ago" It's been known for a lot longer than that. Larry Niven had them in his novel A World Out of Time (1976) and I think Heinlein had them in some of his novels from the 1960s. I suspect the concept predates those novels.
on “The Plot Against Trains” ↗When I was about 16, I read Larry Niven's _A World Out of Time_. It left me with very mixed feelings about the matter. Unfortunately all the times I had the means to sign up for such, I didn't have the desire to. Tell me, what would you do if your spouse had no…
on “Fighting Cancer” ↗…than Io, and also the Jupiter system is quite full of radiation. I don't know if Earth's magnetic field could shield us, and I also don't know what Jupiter's tides would do to it. Interesting note: A World out of Time by Larry Niven ends up with Earth in Jupiter orbit. However, it was orbiting much further out. The Jovian system isn't necessarily intrinsically hostile, it's just this puts Earth way too close to it.
on “What If The Moon Were Replaced By Other Planets?” ↗This is a plot point in Niven's "A World Out of Time". The global state views cryogenically frozen people as expendable commodities and uses them for missions that normal citizens won't be asked to do, or which require their antique perspectives. If they…
on “MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading” ↗Though now discredited, you'll occasionally see McConnell's idea of RNA-based memory transfer in old science fiction, in particular _A World Out of Time_ by Larry Niven.
on “Memories Can Be Injected and Survive Amputation and Metamorphosis” ↗…problem, we can make increasingly accurate estimations. Enough to usually get orbital mechanics right in the short-term. For a setting where we were getting it right until we got it wrong, see Niven's "A World out of Time".
on “A dwarf planet coming within 11 AU of the sun over the next 10 years” ↗I was going to say that Larry Niven wrote a novel (A World out of Time?) in which the cryogenically frozen were resurrected to perform menial or otherwise undesirable jobs, as a form of indentured servitude. IIRC, trust funds set up by the deceased to pay for their preservation…
on “What ever happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?” ↗Yes, A World Out Of Time by Larry Niven. "Almost all remaining life on Earth has adapted to live in Antarctica. Elsewhere life is extinct except for some evidence of biological activity in the Himalayan mountains." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_World_Out_of_Time
on “Map of the Week: What Does the Land Under Antarctica’s Ice Sheet Look Like?” ↗