X-Message-Number: 7697
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1997 01:20:27 -0500 (EST)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: Forthcoming Book about Cryonics

I have received a satisfactory offer from HardWired (the new and highly
successful book division of Wired magazine) to write a short nonfiction
book about cryonics. HardWired wants the completed text by the end of May 
and intends to publish it in the fall of this year (very fast compared 
with most publishers).

The book will not focus exclusively on cryonics. It will discuss the
changing definition of death and will describe various innovations that
have made death less "final" (e.g. procedures currently used to
resuscitate patients in hospital emergency rooms). The middle part of the
book will describe cryonics as it is practiced today. The last third of
the book will begin by discussing current research and will then look
ahead to the future, 20 and 40 years from now. Ultimately the book will
attempt to depict a world in which the aging process has been eliminated.

I have wanted to write a book about cryonics for the past six years. I
made a previous attempt, but the portion-and-outline was turned down by
the dozen publishers who read it. In my experience, cryonics is a very
easy topic to sell to magazines, TV, and radio, but is almost impossible
to sell to book publishers. Even at HardWired the deal almost collapsed
when the publisher turned out to have an extremely negative reaction to
the "soulless, mechanistic" concept of life implied by cryonics. 

Still, it is possible that some other writer, somewhere, is also working 
on a book about cryonics. In fact the main purpose of this post is to 
suggest that if anyone knows about another writer pursuing this topic, 
we should be in touch with each other so that we can compare notes and 
ensure that our books are as different from each other as possible.

Needless to say, my book will not be partisan, will not focus on any one
cryonics organization, and will give all service providers equal
prominence. 

--Charles Platt


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