3 ms·

I completely respect your opinion on this and would agree that Zero K is jarring if your a fan of his earlier work. However, I quite enjoyed it. It was short a

by Bodell 6y ago

I completely respect your opinion on this and would agree that Zero K is jarring if your a fan of his earlier work. However, I quite enjoyed it. It was short and to the point. It also reminded me quite a bit of my own experience walking through the hospice ward in the days leading up to my grandmothers death. The namelessness of it, the religious iconography, even the traveling to a distant place (AR) and sleeping there in the hospital. Because of this I feel it was not so much a book about cytogenetics but how living people deal with death. The cryogenic part of it could easily be supplanted with our religious beliefs that we will die and wake up in a better world.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
I think it was exactly this idea that made the book fail in my eyes. Cryonics is patently not similar to religion in the sense of being comforted by myth or iconography and stories about waking up in a better place. Representing wealthy cryonics customers as if they were borderline cult members is more like surrealism than drama. People who actually put money on cryonics overwhelmingly believe it’s got a super low chance of working and that the world you might wake up in is just as likely to have endemic social problems and suffering as our current world, or possibly even be far worse in a lot of unsettling ways. People who care about cryonics spend time obsessing over crazy philosophy of mind, AI ethics, and far future forecasting ideas. They don’t go into it lightly with some fluffy ideas of waking up in a peaceful utopia. As a result, the characters in Zero K just don’t work. Their mix of naïveté but hyper progressive awareness of scientific possibility, while also being wealthy titans of industry for decades, simply doesn’t exist inside the same person at once unless the characters are just purely vehicles for allegory and symbolism, which is hardly what has made DeLillo’s other works notable.

by Bodell 6y ago

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

I think it was exactly this idea that made the book fail in my eyes. Cryonics is patently not similar to religion in the sense of being comforted by myth or iconography and stories about waking up in a better place. Representing wealthy cryonics customers as if they were borderline cult members is more like surrealism than drama. People who actually put money on cryonics overwhelmingly believe it’s got a super low chance of working and that the world you might wake up in is just as likely to have endemic social problems and suffering as our current world, or possibly even be far worse in a lot of unsettling ways. People who care about cryonics spend time obsessing over crazy philosophy of mind, AI ethics, and far future forecasting ideas. They don’t go into it lightly with some fluffy ideas of waking up in a peaceful utopia. As a result, the characters in Zero K just don’t work. Their mix of naïveté but hyper progressive awareness of scientific possibility, while also being wealthy titans of industry for decades, simply doesn’t exist inside the same person at once unless the characters are just purely vehicles for allegory and symbolism, which is hardly what has made DeLillo’s other works notable.