Things I Learned While I Was Dead

The eye-catching title draws the reader into a tale of all-consuming love for a sister and its consequences. 17-year-old Calico is stricken with grief and guilt at the death of her sister: grief because they are twins and were inseparable and guilt, because she left terminally ill Asha alone one evening to go out to a party and returned to find her slipping into death. Her mother had returned and Calico felt that she saw blame in her eyes and was determined to do anything she could to repair the damage.

The path she chose was cryogenics: Asha would be frozen until a cure was found and she would be frozen too, reanimated when Asha’s cure had been found and participating in a 2 year research programme to pay for the procedures. However, when Calico was reanimated 45 years had passed, there was no sign of Asha and she was in a primitive, run-down former prison rather than the state-of-the-art medical research facility she had been promised. Both she and her mother had been duped into signing up for cryogenic preservation by Lucas Fates (a deliberate pun?) an unscrupulous doctor obsessed with reanimating his mother and prevented by a lack of funds in a damaged world increasingly resistant to the concept of cryogenics.

Calico and the other 3 participants lied to by Fates-Jem, Taylor and Veda-attempt to find a way out of their imprisonment. The only ally they have is Doctor Perez who represents the antithesis of Fates and his deranged practices. Calico has been returned to life in a world crippled by climate change, almost shorn of technology and struggling to make a new beginning. Perez is committed to the primary concerns of protecting people and the earth, fighting viruses and restoring the planet by drawing on knowledge and human wisdom: the old, rational way rather than conflict and annihilation. Fates’ shambolic medical facility, a metaphor for the ills of the old regime, must be destroyed if its inhabitants are to survive.

The destruction is achieved despite seemingly impossible odds, strong and healthy relationships are formed between the four young people but for Calico there was a price to pay.  Asha is dead, her Russian cryogenic centre destroyed in a fire years previously and their mother is dead, too. Despite the pain, disillusionment and immorality which the Fates Centre represented, the ultimate message of the book is hope for the future. We leave our characters involved in regenerative projects to bring the planet back to life and to steer its inhabitants away from prejudice, hatred and taking advantage of others and the planet’s resources in order to further their own ends. This is a timely tale, full of both drama and contemplation and we would do well to heed its warnings to reject what is destructive and instead focus on what we have and how to help it thrive.