Tomorrow and Tomorrow
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
“Truly a love story of the ages.”—The Orlando Sentinel
“Will keep you on the edge of your seat.”—David Brin
“One of the most imaginative, exciting talents to appear on the SF scene.”—Publishers Weekly
“Ambitious, elegiac, and ultimately satisfying.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Ana is the love of Drake Merlin’s life. The woman he wants to grow old with, share every experience. But there is a hitch that is preventing them from obtaining their happily ever after….
Ana might be perfect for him, but she is dying.
Diagnosed with a rare disease, there is no cure for what ails her. At least, not in the 21st century. The only thing Drake can do—the one gamble that might, eventually, bring her back—is have Ana frozen and join her in cryogenic sleep until, one day, technology will have advanced enough be able to cure her.
Eons pass, and Drake is revived again and again, to see if humanity has evolved enough to be able to provide a solution. They try everything to help him bring her back or to encourage him to move on from his frozen soulmate—even creating a clone of his beloved. But it is not his Ana, his love. Nothing but her full revival will satisfy his obsession.
Millions of years pass before Drake learns that there is finally some hope for her restoration. At the Omega Point, the universe is collapsing, merging past and present; connecting the knowhow of now to the Ana of so long ago….
But first he must help the rest of humanity. Drake is revived one more time to fight an alien race who is hell bent on destroying the Solar System. For only a throwback from a past, where dissidence, material greed and violence were a part of human existence, will have enough fighting spirit to save a race that’s now too enlightened to understand war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sheffield, who won the 1993 Nebula and 1994 Hugo awards for his novelette, Georgia on My Mind, fleshes out another piece of short fiction, At the Eschaton, to create this story of love's triumph over illness and mortality. The talented 21st-century composer Drake Merlin leads a seemingly charmed life; that is, until his wife, Ana, is stricken by a mysterious and incurable illness. Desperate, Merlin has his wife placed in cryostasis and sets about amassing a fortune to keep her there until a cure can be found. Then, like the Arthurian character for whom he's named, Merlin joins her prolonged sleep. The years pass, and while Merlin is awakened at various times--500 years later, to discover the solar system undergoing massive terraforming; then 20,000 years later--the news about his wife remains as bleak as ever. The future Sheffield envisions is fairly familiar, until Merlin awakens some 14 million years hence. Here, he sees the sun has burned down to red, and humanity has branched off into numerous subspecies capable of surviving in hostile environments. While this setting is truly alien, the reasons for Merlin's revival is a bit cliched--a docile humanity faces a terrifying enemy, and so Merlin's "primitive drive and aggression" is the last hope. The novel does not generate a consistently compelling narrative, in part because Merlin's love for his wife is portrayed as tender and sincere but lacks the passion that would motivate such heroics. Also given the sprawling canvas, Sheffield offers only tepid surprises. Sheffield, a mathematician and physicist by training, offers a laudable appendix discussing the scientific cornerstones of the novel.
