Immortality Inc.

By Robert Sheckley

The year is 1958. A man, driving along a highway at night, crashes his car. He feels the steering column pierce his chest. He feels his head smash into the windshield. He dies.
But he doesn't. He awakes in a hospital bed. He feels fine. He has no scars or wounds from the crash. And he soon finds out that it is not 1958. It is 2110. The man is told he is part of an experiment. His living mind has been snatched from the moment of his death and brought into the future and placed into the body of a volunteer who sold his body to support his family and had his mind erased.
Naturally our man is upset and uncertain. He doesn't know what to do with himself and the corporation that performed the experiment has now backed out for fear of government reprisals. He is on his own, a man with obsolete skills living in a world vastly different from what he knew before.
And if that wasn't bad enough he is now being plagued by a zombie and by a ghost. These creatures are side effects of the mind transference process. Now the man not only has to adapt to future society he also has to figure out what the zombie wants and why the ghost is out to get him.
And a strange society it is where people sell their bodies to be used as hosts for rich people's minds and where science has proven the existence of the afterlife, although they don't have a handle on what the afterlife actually is, they just know it is real. So death is a lot less frightening, in fact there is even insurance that will guarantee the policy holder's entrance to the afterlife.

This was an OK book. It has a lot of interesting ideas about death and the afterlife. It was written in the 1950s so it is dated, for instance, a giant computer that uses paper tape and punch cards. I guess I'd say it was a fair read.

New Words

Hebephrenic: hebephrenia is a form of schizophrenia. "The forms of ghostly madness could be categorized like madness on Earth. There were the melancholics, drifting disconsolately through the scenes of their great passion; the whispering hebephrenic, chattering gay and random nonsense; the idiots and imbeciles who returned in the guise of little children; the schizophrenics who imagined themselves to be animals, prototypes of vampire and Abominable Snowman, werewolf, weretiger, werefox, weredog."

Teredos: marine worms that damage untreated wood by drilling holes in it. "Then you look the boat over. You see that the frames are cracked, teredos have gotten into the rudder post, there's dry rot in the mast step, the sails are mildewed, the keel bolts are rusted, and the fastenings are ready to let go."