Zero K
by Don DeLillo · first published 2010
57% recommend14% neutral29% critical
Jeffrey Lockhart’s father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say “an uncertain farewell” to her as she surrenders her body. “We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn’t it a human glory to refuse to acce
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You might enjoy Zero K, a Don DeLillo book that is more or less about cryogenic suspension.
on “An Open Letter From Elizabeth Holmes” ↗For those interested in this stuff, or the "we will preserve your body and resurrect you in some date in the future" technology, I recommend a Don Delillo novel from a couple years ago, title is Zero K.
on “MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading” ↗…can't control. Maybe I'm wrong. Only with the passage of time we will know whether these people will be resurrected or not. As I said, I'm betting on "no chance in hell". If you like Don DeLillo, Zero K is an excellent criticism of cryonics.
on “Why Cryonics Makes Sense (2016)” ↗One of Don DeLillo's later good novels is about this stuff (Zero K). I always think people's attitude toward possible future worlds is interesting. You can see a wide spread of opinion in this thread -- whether you think functional immortality would be a good thing…
on “‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’” ↗This is a main element of DeLillo's latest book Zero K. A state-of-the-art secret facility is built in a middle of nowhere former Soviet bloc country. It's financed by ultra wealthy people whose bodies are disassembled and frozen with the hopes they will…
on “A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”” ↗I’m a big fan of DeLillo, but I absolutely hated Zero K - his worst writing by far. It was a vapid, childish presentation of cryonics, dressed up in a bunch of confused themes around vanity and selfishness. I was so excited for DeLillo to write based on that…
on “The Genius of Don DeLillo’s Post-Underworld Work (2016)” ↗Based on the same limited exposure to DeLillo, I'd agree with you. "Zero-K" was so boring, I dropped it maybe 75% way through. In general I enjoy both genre and "literary" novels, but Zero-K felt deliberately anodyne: meandering minimalist pseudo-scifi optimized for the sensibilities…
on “Don DeLillo deserves the Nobel” ↗