Longer by Michael Blumlein

Some writers are distinctive, even if they don't write all that much: they have a style and a set of concerns all their own. Michael Blumlein was one of those, a doctor by training (and career: writing was, as far as I know, always a side-job) whose work was always about fleshy concerns, often uncomfortably so.

His first story was “Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report” in Interzone in 1984. I will not try to describe that story - everyone should read it once - but it is a very chilly and dark story that manages to out-Ballard J.G. Ballard. Blumlein went on from there to write horror-tinged SF, and less commonly fantasy - though some readers might argue about which was the tinge and which was the main genre. You could call it body horror most of the time, though that's hugely reductive of the work of a man who knew the human body much much better than most writers ever could, or would want to.

His last novel was Longer, published around the time of his death in 2019. It's relatively tame for Blumlein - maybe I should say "accessible for non-Blumlein fans" instead - about researchers a hundred or two years in the future (it's the twenty-second century, but Blumlein is quiet about which end), working in a space habitat and arguing about the point of life.

Gunjita and Cav are married, both successful in their fields - he was mostly a surgeon for a long time, and has moved into research as the role for surgery has declined as less intrusive, more bio-targeted solutions have become more and more common.

The biggest one of those solutions is the one implied in the title: life extension. Blumlein doesn't get into a lot of details in this short novel - about life extension, or about a lot of things - but there is a standard, safe, commercially-available rejuvenation procedure, cheap enough, it seems, that most middle-class people can expect to afford it. We don't know how long it has been available, but it's known that it only works twice - so it's been around at least sixty years, and probably longer. The current target is to rejuvenate at the age of eighty-two - Blumlein does a bit of sleight-of-hand around second rejuvenations and the ages of his people, citing what seem to be apparent ages rather than calendar ages, so that people who have juved once or twice aren't called out as being, for example, a hundred and fifty. The vague timeline means we're not clear how many people have come up against the end of their second rejuvenated life - we are told that a few people tried to juve a third time, with horrific results, but not how long ago, and we do know that people like Gunjita and Cav (well, including them) are actively working to make a third juve safe.

The characters note, in what seems to be honesty, that it's mostly a nice world (albeit warmer than ours) without a lot of upheaval and with still-increasing and spreading prosperity. Not a utopia - it's somewhat dominated by corporations, and the profit motive is still deeply important - but a good place to live, especially if you are smart and skilled, experienced and knowledgeable. And, if you are all those things, you can expect three lives at this point. (No one notes that these people possibly were born when no juves were available, and that a third, and so on, may actually become available in their lifetimes, but that seems entirely reasonable to me, given the premises. They're at the edge of that transition, maybe, and could be the first generation not to have to die. No guarantees, of course, but it's entirely plausible from what Blumlein presents.)

Longer is about two things: first, Cav is physically in his mid-eighties, and has been putting off juving. (I think this would be his second, but the text is a bit vague, in this as in so many other things. He may be a lifetime younger than Gunjita.) Gunjita recently juved; she's physically in her twenties. Over the course of the novel, Cav goes from vaguely procrastinating his next rejuvenation to actively thinking about when the end of his life should be.

The other thing Longer is about is called the Ooi. Gunjita and Cav, as a sidebar to other projects, sent out a space probe called Eurydice, about to return with a rocky sample from an asteroid. And, on that asteroid, is...well, something else. Not a piece of the asteroid rock, clearly separate but stuck to that rock. Cav immediately believes it's organic in origin - and not organic-from-Earth, of course. Gunjita is far more reticent about this thing that looks like puke.

So they observe the Ooi. Uninvasively at first, then, tentatively, with the most gentle spectra they can. Finally, they decide to slice at it. To do so, they call in the third character of the novel: Dashaud. Once a protégé of Gunjita, now a follower of Cav, another surgeon with younger, rejuvenated, augmented hands.

It's not a novel of plot: it's mostly Gunjita, Cav, and to a lesser extend Dash thinking, talking to each other, looking at the Ooi, making theories and puncturing each other's theories, making plans and critiquing each other's plans. The Ooi remains enigmatic throughout, but Cav gets more and more convinced of what he always had in the back of his mind.

I find it hard to ignore that this is a novel written by a man who was dying of lung cancer at the time. It is quieter than most of Blumlein's work, more of a microscope than a scalpel. I wished Blumlein had time or space or desire to detail his world more, but he didn't. This is the book we have: knotty in a small space, taut and poised, a story that implies and questions more than it says.