Tomorrow and Tomorrow

This is one of those books which after you finish it leaves you thinking. After I was done my mind raced all over the place with the possibilities of possibilities. I liked it so much that I bought it and make it a point to read my favorite passages every so often. I highly recommend this book to anyone who not only likes science fiction but also enjoys thinking about the future and all the possibilities of life.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Charles Sheffielf tells the story of one man's odyssey to the end of time in the pursuit of lost love, expanded from the short story "At the Eschantion." The book can easily be seen as two separate stories. It begins by telling the tale of a professional musician, Drake Merlin, and his wife, Ana. The two seem to be living the perfect lives when one day Drake comes home and discovers that his wife has developed a terminal form of cancer. In desperation he has her cryogenically preserved moments before her death. He then has himself frozen, his head filled with knowledge that may one day prove to be useful. His hop is that some day he will be revived in a future where Ana can be cured and the can live out their lives together. Drake gets revived some five hundred years in the future but it was a time and place that sought to keep him from his love. Drake then goes about acquiring a ship that can travel at relativistic speeds and steals his wife's cryotank and leave the solar system. To him, only months pass, but to those he left behind, thousands of years have gone by when he returns. It is from here that the story takes a turn because Drake has foolishly opened Ana's tank while in transit leaving her dead beyond repair. Drake put himself back into cryosleep in thinking that maybe the future will provide the answers he needs. Now the story is based more on a history of our future and Drake's participation in fighting off a galactic scourge, the Shiva, that threatens all sentient life in the galaxy. But Drake's journey can end only the end of the universe, when all matter is beginning to fall back to the point of its birth. At the Eschantion, a moment in time when all information that ever was and would be is within his reach, Drake hopes to recover the lost soul of his beloved. In reading this story I was intrigued by the questions it raised about our own humanity. What does it men to be human? In time artificially intelligent machines are created and human minds can exit in totally computer-generated environments or be downloaded into mechanical or biologically engineered bodies that are nothing that we of today would consider "human." Not only do these minds exist in a sort of cyberspace, they are also frequently copied and downloaded into multiple bodies. Drake goes through a similar process many times in order to defeat the Shiva. The author comes to the conclusion early in the book that humans are not just physical bodies; rather, we are our minds and thought and ideas. According the Sheffield, the human mind is our soul. Tomorrow and Tomorrow is an easy read for fans of the hard science-fiction genre and its look in the future is fascinating. The concepts of technology and science can be technical at times but in no way interferes with the story telling. Some may feel a little let down by the end of the book, but nothing that's bad enough to ruin it. In my opinion this is a must read for all tha

Buy it. T & t is an almost perfect exemple of what hard sci-fi should be. As allways with Sheffield, the scope of the plot is enormous the science is beliveble and abundent, and his ideas about future development of technolegy and society are remarkble. buy it.

One of the most satisfying and grand science fiction stories I have read in 30 years. This is the book that current-day SETI radioastronomers should read to broaden their relatively closed minds. One major character is missing, however, in the book's appendix that sets forth a history of scientific ideas. Here the modern view of the cosmos is seen as beginning with Galileo's belief that the sun is a globe of gas. Actually, the modern view of the universe began about 35 years earlier with Giordano Bruno's realization that the stars are suns, not little points of twinkling light that move around the "celestial sphere" in various ways. Bruno's notion was later dismissed by Galileo and his contemporaries as wild and unprovable. It was also Bruno who extrapolated from this that planets (i.e. "worlds" -- another Brunerian notion) revolve around these stars like they do here and that some percentage of these worlds harbor intelligent civilizations like or unlike our own. Unlike Galileo, Bruno believed that the universe was infinite and composed of innumerable suns and worlds ("solar systems"), not a "celestial sphere" consisting of one world, one sun, and a bunch of "stars", some "wandering" (the planets), others less mobile (the stars), as Galileo believed. Bruno understood that neither the sun nor the earth was the center but was both whereever an observor stood and nowhere in particular. Although a prime mover of the age of reason, Bruno also all but invented the modern notion of romantic love: *he* was the inspiration for Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," among others of the Bard's plays. Bruno was also the first to coin and seriously believe the phrase "philosophical liberty", an idea which was not lost on the Churches of his time (he was excomunicated from three of these). It was the Catholic Church that burned him at the stake in 1600, for unlike Galileo Father Bruno steadfastly refused to recant HIS ideas. Other than this oversight, Tomorrow and Tomorrow is about as good as it gets in science fiction. (Review by Thomas N. Hackney)

Tomorrow and tomorrow is one of the finest book's I've ever read. Even though it's two stories in one, Sheffield looses none of the aspects of any of the stories, you still feel for the main character and can understand the evolution of the universe... I shouldn't really be writing a review, I can hardly describe the proportions of this book. I loved it, but it's not for someone without empathy for the characters or who can't understand the science, otherwise, it's amazing. This and "Assemblers of Infinity" are the two best books I've read in a long time, I wish there were more like this.