When I was discussing my life-extension technology class with the professors I am co-teaching with, the sociology prof mentioned issues of inequality; only rich people can afford things like Alcor right now. That caused Orson Scott Card's The Worthing Chronicle to pop into my head. Worthing Chronicle was a rewrite of Card's first novel, Hot Sleep, which had a companion book, a collection of short stories called Capitol, which gave the backstory for it. Capitol is the Trantoresque (now we would say Coruscantesque, I guess, but not in 1979) center of a galactic empire, where the elite spend much of their time in suspended animation; the richer you are, the more you can afford. This only multiplies the power of the elite. I had read a selection of stories from Capitol in The Worthing Saga, a collection from Tor that republished Worthing Chronicle along with some related short fiction, but I had never read the book itself. So I tracked it down to see if there were any stories in it that would be worth teaching in our class.
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| Collection published: 1980 Contents originally published: 1978-79 Acquired: January 2021 Read: March 2021 |
There is indeed some good stuff. "Skipping Stones" is a decent tale about two boys, one rich and one poor, who grow increasingly separate thanks to use of somec (the drug that creates the suspended animation). I also really enjoyed "Second Chance," which deals with some issues of memory manipulation as well; those are the two that seemed particularly worth teaching in the context of our class.
Outside of that theme, there are some other solid stories here. "Lifeloop" is a trifle obvious but well written, about a person whose whole life is broadcast (we would now say "streamed") such that the self has become a performance, even more relevant now, I suspect, than it would have been in 1979. "And What Will We Do Tomorrow?" delves into the psychology of Mother, the ancient ruler of Capitol, who uses somec so much she's only awake for a day every five years.
I checked the contents of Capitol against the ISFDB's entry for Worthing Saga as I went, and I have to say, I think Card absolutely made the right call on which stories he kept in print, and which ones he did not. Many of the stories here, especially earlier in the book are bad, clumsy vehicles for exposition about Capitol and somec that don't make any sense, especially "A Sleep and a Forgetting." So Capitol is more an interesting curio than something worth tracking down on its own merits; if you want the good stuff, you can already get that from The Worthing Saga.
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