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Beyond Future Shock


by Alex Alaniz

List Price: $7.99
Available: Usually ships in 24 hours
Sales Rank: 1157666
Studio: BookSurge Publishing
Binding: Paperback
Number Of Pages: 424
Publication Date: June 22, 2005
Publisher: BookSurge Publishing


EDITORIAL REVIEWS

Product Description
Beyond Future Shock begins as a pre-WWII love story that flows into an allegory and, ultimately, a powerful morality tale. It demands an answer to the question: What will become of mankind in the not-so-distant future, when we are faced with the dire consequences of our own trans-corporeal fusion into machines...and beyond? Three young, brilliant Germans form an intense friendship in academia. Heinreich and Lise later marry, but Hans, who has become a fervent Nazi, exposes Lise and her Jewish family. Lise escapes but her family is sent to Auschwitz while Heinreich, a test pilot, is coerced into fighting the war against American bombers to keep his wifes family alive. After the war ends, neither lover knows that the other is alive. Heinreich is expatriated to develop military jets for the Americans; Lise, caught by the Russians, is forced to help them build nuclear bombs; Heinreich becomes a wealthy industrialist with an American wife. A Cold War KGB assassination attempt destroys his family, except for his son, Douglas, who becomes an oil futures trader. When Douglas is killed in the World Trade Center terror strike, grief, loss, and ambition drive Heinreich into the world of Arab oil and retribution. At this time Lise, freed from the collapsing Soviet Union, retires to Paris. From this point forward, the story explodes into one of scientific vision: youth cocktails and human minds capable of being uploaded into mind-space servers. It is only then that Heinreich and Lise are finally reunited. But it is a time of fear, when these mind-space servers take on the characteristics of aggressive and powerful predators seeking to control the Earth and threaten the survival of humanity in the ultimate post-Darwinian war.


CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 9 reviews)

the past the future  
great book. i'm a history major that enjoyed the telling of the past & how it connects to the future. this book does exactly that and more. i would recommend and also tell you that it is an easy read.
April 06, 2007

Cannot wait for the movie  
The love story between Heinreich and Lise, which takes them from their childhoods in WWII through the age of youth restoring technologies in the 2020s and beyond reminded me very much of Dr. Zhivago. Lise, a physicist, is a German Jew. Heinreich, a nobleman and fighter pilot is German. Just when they begin their lives together, they are torn apart by the forces of history, and try as they might to reunite, fate works against them. Yet, as science and technology advance, often for the purposes of war, these two do more than survive. In America, thinking Lise is dead, Heinreich thrives, becoming a wealthy aerospace industrialist. In Russia, Lise, also thinking Heinreich is dead, works on nuclear weapons. In their 90s, when stem cell and nanotechnology lead to youth restoration coctails, they reunite. Humanity seems on the verge of curing all its ills including death. But the power of pro-active evolution, no longer driven by chance, but by science, leads to the ultimate war for survival of the fittist post-human beings across the Solar System. This time Lise and Heinreich, using his vast aerospace resources to save humanist rebels and refugees, cling together. Suddenly, gripping the book ever tighter, you're thrust into a huge, strong science fiction 21st century techno-space battle. I cannot wait for the movie.

Belleno
January 03, 2006

Engrossing futuristic tale  
I have to admit, I would have never picked this book up had it not been for the shameless plugs Dr. Alaniz, the author, has placed all over this site like some kind of cyberspace Burma Shave commercial. Now back to THIS book...The love story is not that engaging, but the fact that the science behind the story could happen in the near future in the way that Dr. Alaniz lays out the story is very frightening because it hits so close to home. The fact that the Richard Cheneys of the world could upload their brains into servers once their bodies give out, plug into limitless amounts of knowledge and thus wed the incarnate evil of the human soul and all of its insatiable appetites with all of the technology and knowledge available to man is chilling. 30 years ago DNA technology was just a dream, now it is commonly used as "the finger of God" to indict criminals and to free the wrongfully imprisoned. Thus, the idea of a permanent upper class that can never be overthrown because it shall always be smarter than everyone else due to nanotechnology and genetic engineering is an idea whose time is coming very soon. I would like to compare this work by Dr. Alaniz to Carl Sagan's "Contact", and it does compare in daring and originality. However, ultimately "Contact" was a hopeful work and I find the truth behind this book just frightening. Highly recommended.
December 25, 2005

Mind Blowing!!!  
I completely agree with my friend Cathy's review, but as a concerned bioethicist, I worry that most of humanity might soon become insignificant in light of near future biotechnology. Alex's book, through the entangled lives, deep romances and awesome adventures of his living characters, has only made my fears worse. Whereas I have feared that within 10 to 20 years the ultra rich will be able to buy highly expensive, highly improved invitro produced offspring, leaving our kids in the dust of post-Darwinian evolution, Alex warns us that the super rich are likely to simply use their billion dollar resources to upload their minds into large supercomputers in thirty or forty years. Then the rest of us will be truly left in the dust. To me, Beyond Future Shock is a book filled with ideas that everyone should hear about, or see if this visually graphic epic is ever made into a block buster movie.

Randy
December 06, 2005

Great to the last page  
Wrapped in a compelling love story than spans hundreds of years, Alaniz's novel is a solid science-based fiction dealing with humnanity's fast approaching bio/nano conversion to transhumanity: the so-called Singularity. (See Ray Kurzweil's new book, "The Singularity is Near" for a good, science based treatment of Singularity; Kurzweil claims it is no more than 50 years away.)

Beyond Future Shock, while carrying you away to scenes of romance amid vivid battles scenes, past, present and future, makes you think about the religious, scientific, and ecnomic promises and perils of Singularity

A Nazi combat pilot and his Jewish wife are torn apart during WWII. One gets to the know the hapless couple, Lise and Henreich during their "school" days at a Hitler youth academy all the way through the outbreak of WWII, when Lise's Jewish ancestry is revealed by a jealous "friend" of Heinreich. A beutiful romance is torn apart. The treatment of WWII, of its aerial combat and death camp suffering in particular, is painfully vivid. From the end of WWII through the Cold War, and the new war on terror, Lise (who ends up working for the Russians on nuclear weapons) and Heinreich (who emigrates to the United States and becomes a super succesful aerospace industrialist) do not reunite until they are in their late nineties in the late 2010s, when the first stem cell based "youth coctails" are being released for general consumption.

The world, on the edge of "killing" death through modern science, is, however, energy starved, and conflict between Luddite religious factions is rampant. Things only get worse when bio/nano brain chips, originally designed to cure Alzheimer patients in the early 2030s, enter the black market, and people begin to "upload" their brains into mindspace servers. The new beings, freed from slow, accidental evoulution, begin to evolve into ever more advanced and agressive beings through bio/nano technology, and a war involving every single transhuman erupts over possession of mindspace and energy resources.

Yet again the ex-Nazi combat pilot and his wife find themselves facing a world on fire. Heinreich and Lise use their vast aerospace resources to build a moon base to house mindspace refugies and humanist rebels who are trying to bring peace back to Earth. The battle between Earth and the humanists spills into the solar system. At stake is the future of transhumanity. Will a few, or even a single, ulitmate post-Darwinian super being take over the whole of the Solar System?

Chatherine Houghton
December 06, 2005
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