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The Aphasian
Mar 8, 2007

Psychotropic Hops


I'm looking for the title of a science fiction book I read around 2000. It was kind of a modern "The Time Machine".

The book starts out a man and wife very much in love. She gets sick with some incurable illness, and just before she dies he has her cyrogenically frozen. He takes a few years searching for the cure before deciding to freeze himself as well and join her in the future when a cure has been found.

Throughout the rest of the book it follows him as he wakes up every 100; 1,000; 1,000,000 years. The first couple of times the cure has not yet been found and he tools around in the future and he gets frozen again. When he wakes up to find that the cure has finally been found, he discovers that his wife was either frozen improperly or frozen using an unperfected method, so the tissue damage is extensive. He has to freeze himself again, waiting for medical science to figure out a way to treat extensive cell damage.

The book has all kinds of strange speculation; for instance, at one point the sciences have advanced so much that the jargon specific to each branch (medical, chemical, computer, etc.) has each become its own incomprehensible and separate language. Eventually, instead of being frozen, he is uploaded to some kind of super computer network to wait to be reunited with his wife.

This is the important bit, but it's at the end and I don't want to ruin it for anyone.

His wifes body was stored at a facility on or orbiting Pluto I think, and is lost when the facility is destroyed in an accident. He is heartbroken and despairs, having traveled thousands of years just to be with her again. He finds some theory relating to the fact that information is never truly lost or destroyed, and at the end of the universe all matter, energy and information will be compressed into a single point or something and effectively, he will be reunited with her "essence". It's kind of a scientific reconstruction of heaven.

The title is one word (or "the" and one word), and that word is the term for the end of the universe when all information is attainable. The book was so-so; good ideas mixed with sappiness and ridiculous speculation. What bugs me is that I really want to know the title, not to find the book again, but because it was a word that I liked immensely. All internet searches for it just return Hitchhiker's references when I try.

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The Aphasian
Mar 8, 2007

Psychotropic Hops


LittleSunshine posted:

You're describing Tomorrow & Tomorrow by Charles Sheffield as far as I can tell, and the term used there is the Omega Point (from Teilhard de Chardin's books). Ring bells?

Got it in one. I don't know why I thought it was a one-word title; I assume I saw the term "omega point" somewhere on the jacket or later just retconned my own memory to pick a more sci-fi title.

The Aphasian
Mar 8, 2007

Psychotropic Hops


The main character was a gullible, greedy sort of idiot. His boss convinced him he was a detective/super spy and sent him on a wild goose chase so (I think) the boss could bang his wife. Like a really dark version of "The Man Who Knew Too Little"

Things I remember:

He was injected with a "super serum" which was really just a blend of uppers and narcotics.

There was a passage about specially trained guard dogs, responded to German commands, I think they had laryngectomies.

The author of the book is well respected, but hates "New Yorker" literary types and hangs out in blue collar bars in a rural/mining community.

I thought it was called "The Warlock" but that's returning a bunch of fantasy and YA novels.

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