The Unfrozen by Ernst Dreyfuss

These people were our enemies.  Two of us against thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of superior, mechanically ultrasophisticated human beings.  Judging by their everyday gadgets, their weaponry must have been something awesome.  They distrusted us because we were different from them, primitive to their way of looking at life.  They were desireless, while we looked at life as a God-given gift to enjoy.  We were in a bottomless pit.  Was there really a way to get out of it?

Over a year ago at an antique mall I bought a copy of 1970's The Unfrozen because it had a Jeff Jones cover.  In a recent gesture towards organizing the shelves of the MPorcius Library, I came upon this 158-page paperback and thought I might read it, see what it is all about.  The Science Fiction Encyclopedia suggests there is a mystery as to who the author, who only has this single work listed at isfdb, really is.  Well, I like getting direct first-hand knowledge of these oddities, so let's dig in.

Our narrator, Neal McDavid, is an intern in Houston, in 1969.  His official work is in the development of heart transplantation, but he is also interested in life extension and especially cryogenics.  His girlfriend is a beautiful blonde nurse, Marya Svenson, a Swedish immigrant.  We get some soap opera stuff in the first two chapters of this 29-chapter novel as we witness the start of this couple's relationship and their disputes over birth control and abortion--Marya is Catholic and refuses to use a condom when they have sex and when she gets pregnant she rejects Neal's suggestion she have an abortion.  She wants to get married but he insists they wait a year, until he has finished his internship.  She runs off and gets severely injured in a car wreck that it is hinted is a suicide attempt.  

When Marya shows up at the hospital where Neal is interning and is found to be braindead, the staff plans to carve her up so her organs can be used in transplants, but Neal (who, as an intern, has more authority than I would have thought) has her frozen intact, and then freezes himself--he has realized he can't live without Marya and is willing to risk the freezing process rather than face the possibility his beloved won't be revived until after he has grown old or died.  Somewhat humorously, the freezing process does not involve drugs or machinery--Neal just uses buckets of ice and lays down next to his clinically dead girlfriend.  There are a few scenes like this that make you wonder if The Unfrozen is a goofy satire.

Neal wakes up in the future, in a huge transparent antiseptic space station.  The people here are all thin, never blink, and have a skin color like coffee with milk, apparently the product of centuries of race-mixing.  This future nation consists of a bunch of space stations--this is the hospital station.  The people have numbers instead of names, call each other "comrade," and have no emotion and make no provisions for privacy.  Computers and robots do all the surgery, and in minutes have fixed Marya's head injury with artificial spare parts; most of the people Neal sees have bodies largely consisting of such spare parts, the availability of which has rendered these future people almost immortal.  The space people don't even eat or defecate--on a regular schedule a computer pumps them intravenously full of a perfect mix of nutrients and calories.  The future people have no knowledge of sex or love--new comrades are produced in a test tube when needed and they are castrated.  When a sleeping Neal has a wet dream the future people are disgusted and decide to castrate Neal and Marya.

Neal figures out a way for he and Marya to escape sterilization.  The space station civilization is in trouble.  The food they all receive intravenously is made from coal, and in a century or so their supply will run out.  Neal offers to go down to Earth to collect more coal--the unblinking future people are unable to accomplish any work down there because the artificial parts that compose most of their bodies aren't suited to the current Earth climate, which is extremely cold, nor to operation at 1 gee--there is no gravity on the space stations and the space comrades spend centuries under weightless conditions.

As the middle third of The Unfrozen begins Neal and Marya meet the president of this post-Earth civilization, the oldest man alive, the only living person (besides Neal and Marya) who was born on Earth--this guy has dark skin--Neal compares his complexion to that of a "mulatto"--and he even blinks.  The Prez gives our heroes a history lesson about the end of life on Earth in 2204, over 500 years ago--he and a few Americans were in orbit at the time of the nuclear war started by the United States of Africa and their ally China against the United States of America and the USSR, and the frozen Neal and Marya were with them.  Over the last five centuries the survivors have built the current space-based society, a society with no desire, no privacy, no racism, no theft or war.  Also, as they begin to run out of coal, laws against wasting energy by speaking unnecessarily.

It takes a while, but Neal finally convinces the government to send our heroes to Earth along with the regular monthly relief team of scientists that man the research station there--the space station people can only stand being on the surface for thirty days, and they never leave the building, just sit in chairs and study the surface with telescopes.  The research center turns out to have been built into Hitler's Berlin bunker, one of the few buildings to survive the atomic war, and Neal and Marya sleep in a bed with "Eva Braun" inscribed on the headboard.  I guess this is part of the satire, the suggestion that Hitler is representative of the Earthbound human race.   

The scientists in the bunker expand on the history lesson the Prez gave our heroes.  In the 21st century the major nations dug up such a volume of natural resources to fuel the space race that the Earth became a hollow shell and earthquakes resulted that killed millions.  The various blocs competed ruthlessly for what little resources were left.  The Chinese-led bloc was developing a superweapon that threatened to give them control of the Earth, so the Western and Westernized states allied with the Soviet Union to launch a preemptive strike that obliterated the Chinese-led bloc.  This left only the US-USSR alliance and a united Africa to contend for the rulership of the world.  The global north was on the brink of achieving the ability to colonize Mars when the Africans, stung by white racism, decided to launch all their nuclear weapons at the white and white-adjacent countries, causing so much destruction that the Earth's orbit was altered, leading to the decrease in temperature and death of every human on the planet.  Sure enough, when Neal and Marya put on their therma suits and oxygen tanks and explore the ruins of Berlin they find frozen corpses among the wreckage.  (These peeps are too irradiated to be revived the way our 20th-century heroes were.)

As the final third of the novel begins Neal and Marya commit suicide--this future world is no place to live in, no place to bring up a child!  They walk out into the freezing cold, oxygen-deficient air of post-holocaust Earth and die, only to be revived by the space people, good as new.  After this caper, the tone of the novel changes; maybe we are supposed to be reminded of how the death and rebirth of Jesus led to a new hopeful era of human life or something.  Whereas earlier, the Earthers considered the space people a bunch of cold mechanical drones living under a tyranny, and the space people considered our heroes dangerous because they were driven by emotion and constituted the sort of people who caused the Earth-ruining nuclear war, after the suicide episode Neal and Marya eagerly pledge allegiance to the space society and become full comrades (they now love Big Brother!) and the space people spare no expense in training and equipping the Earthers so they can survive on Mars, the world they will colonize and from which extract the essential coal.  It is not uncommon in SF novels for the protagonist to switch sides as he realizes the superiority of the alien or rebel society, but here in The Unfrozen Neal's change of attitude seems to come out of nowhere.

Mars in this book has a rich native ecosystem, including extensive deposits of coal and a race of intelligent, though culturally and technologically primitive, natives.  When Earth's orbit was altered, so was that of Mars, and the red planet is now as close to the sun as was Terra and considerably warmer than previously.  The space people train Neal and Marya in the approved technique of dealing with the native life--by projecting thought waves that transmit love!  If the Martian birds and cows know Neal and Marya love them, they will eagerly give up their eggs and milk.  (The space people refuse N & M permission to hunt animals for food.)  And if the intelligent Martians know Neal and Marya love them, they will not attack them.  This whole idea made me groan, because, at the start of the novel, space people were portrayed as emotionless and were even asking Neal to explain what love is to them, and now we are supposed to believe their whole society is based on love and they have advanced psychic techniques to express emotion?  This is a blunder; did Dreyfuss start this novel planning to make the space society a dystopia, and then past the halfway point decide to make it a utopia, and forget to revise the beginning?

Mars is just like Earth, with green grass and forests of pine trees and moss-covered rock, but better--the animals are larger and the cows and chickens produce a prodigious supply of milk and eggs.  Neal and Marya begin a happy fulfilling life on their little Martian farm, which they contrast with their horrible 20th-century lives of the "dog-eat-dog" "rat race," when they had to fight traffic and pay bills.  The novel's climax comes when Marya gives birth to the child conceived back in the 20th century--while she is in labor the Martians arrive, hostile, but Neal and Marya project friendship waves at them and prevent a massacre.

The last dozen or so pages of the novel take place five years on, when our heroes have produced five children who will give birth to the new human race (Neal says "Never mind the incest angle") that will live in harmony, unlike the humanity of Earth which was constantly killing for food and (Neal suggests here at the end of the novel) over sexual frustration.  Neal has also, somehow, built freezers, refrigerators, and a laboratory.  The Martians are the humans' friends and dozens of them work the fields in exchange for food.  Neal figures out why the native Martians are a dying race--they don't get sexually aroused when it is warm, so Neal, who has already revitalized the human race, is going to revitalize the Martian race by setting up air-conditioned buildings in which the Martians can have sex.  (Dreyfuss--and his editors at Tower--commit another blunder here: we are told Neal locks up the fridge so the natives can't see he has been dissecting a dead Martian, and three pages later that he left the fridge door open and it is that cool air which facilitated amorousness among some Martians cleaning the lab.)  

The novel ends with Neal and Marya expressing the belief that everything has happened according to God's plan, and with the implication that the novel's main point is to vindicate authority--the authority of God over the universe has led to a happy life for humans and Martians on Mars, the authority of the space state ended racism and war, and the authority of Neal (who is explicitly likened to God) over the Martians is going to save the native people of the fourth (now third) planet from extinction.

The Unfrozen has a lot of problems but I am feeling generous; since I didn't find it to be terribly laborious or annoying, and there are some glimmers of interest and originality here and there, we'll say it is barely acceptable.  The novel is perhaps an unusual specimen in that it rags on and on about how people are jerks--racist and bellicose--like so much SF does but has a sympathetic view of religion and argues that God is real when most SF stories consider religion a plague.  Potentially interesting issues like religion, racism, sexual dysfunction and the social and psychological drawbacks of immortality are treated in a superficial way, but at least they are there--this isn't a mediocre novel that tries to entertain you with sex and violence, like one of the many Conan pastiches, but a novel in which the author is ambitious and is trying to lay his philosophy on you and tell you what society should be like but he doesn't do a good job of it.  Dreyfuss' style is not great but I suppose it gets the job done, despite some odd tics, like how some words particular to the space society always appear in all caps.  The plot has numerous holes and incongruities (e. g., this super high tech society can't construct remote-controlled robots to mine coal on Mars or Earth?--they already have autonomous robots who can do brain surgery and heart, lung and liver transplants!; every plant and animal on Mars is just like one native to Earth, except the people, who are monsters covered in quills or spines) and the transitions from bitter suspicion between Earthers and spacers to committed solidarity, and from "this is a sterile and emotionless totalitarian state" to "this is a utopia of brotherhood" are poorly handled.  On the plus side, Neal's relationship with Marya and his evolution from abortion-advocating skeptic to devoted husband and father sort of work, and some elements of life in zero gee in the space station society are interesting and feel original.

This unlovely mess has actually been reprinted--in translation into Norwegian with a good cover that doesn't suit the contents depicting an old guy and a young beauty facing some kind of trouble, maybe an aircraft, maybe a really tall person.