Chiller by Sterling Blake

Chiller: A Scientific Suspense Novel by Gregory Benford

I read this as part of my ongoing investigation into science fiction about life extension technology. It's a thriller about an Alcor-like cryonics facility originally published in 1993 under the pen name "Sterling Blake," republished in 2011 under the real name of Gregory Benford, hard sf writer.

Originally published: 1993
Read: July 2023

It's cleverly put together. The novel rotates between four perspectives: a scientist who helps out at Immortality Incorporated (I²), a technician and cryonicist who works there, that cryonicist's girlfriend, and a deranged religious killer who sees cryonics as an affront against God. At first it seems like a fairly standard thriller with cryonics as the maguffin: the killer stalks the other characters, his attacks gradually increasing in ferocity and impact.

I don't normally do this, but it seems warranted in this case: DON'T READ IF YOU EVER INTEND TO READ THIS BOOK! Both the back cover and the review blurbs in front give away what I think is a pretty clever twist. The killer succeeds in killing one of the other protagonists... then another... then another! At that point cryonics is reviewed to not just be a maguffin, because all the dead characters suddenly wake up thirty years in the future, revived by the advancements of medical science. Their killer had gone to ground, but now that they're back, he emerges from hiding to finish the job. It's a clever spin on the typical technothiller formula, where usually the specifics of the technological advance don't matter, and any changes to society don't actually transpire. This is also enhanced by how meticulous the story's details about cryonics are. Benford is a paid-up member of the real Alcor, and we get a lot of good detail and defenses of the movement.

That said, at six hundred pages it feels a bit bloated; you could cut at least a hundred, if not more, and accelerate things quite a bit. Around the midpoint I started to get bored waiting for things to pick up. Conversely, I wish we'd gotten to see a bit more of the future and cryonics' impact on society; it seemed like there was only time to quickly finish off the killer plotline once we were there, though maybe 1990s technothrillers aren't a place to expect a lot of interesting futurism.

Also, the small press 2011 reprint is a bit rough: "straight quotes" instead of proper “curly quotes” look amateurish, and lots of paragraphs are missing their indentations. Whole thing read like it was printed from the file Benford sent to his publisher back in 1993, not the properly copy-edited version they would have prepared.

(I won't be teaching it; at six hundred pages, the amount of what is interesting is not proportionate to its length. But it was an interesting insight into cryonics from a true believer.)