Christian Brannock Through The Ages

Genesis, PART ONE.

Christian Brannock:

in I, a boy;

in II and III, a man;

in IV, an uploaded personality.

In III, a cyberneticist speaks of uploading a personality into a computer but then of transferring the informational matrix of an organism into a database in an advanced neural network. The latter sounds like a better way to express it. Now we understand the reference to Brannock's "...afterlife..." (III, p. 11) If the original organic Brannock had a soul, then that is now in a another, supernatural, afterlife.

For the rest of the novel and for billions of years, post-organic intelligences can at any time reactivate Christian Brannock and do. Poul Anderson conveys the passage of time:

"Sol swung onward through its orbit, once around galactic center in almost two hundred million years, and onward and onward." (IX, p. 96)

How many orbits are encompassed by "...onward and onward"? Yet later:

"So it came about that Christian Brannock found himself alive again, young again..." (PART TWO, V, p. 146)

James Blish's Cities In Flight Teralogy holds up well as a future history until some point in Volume III. From then on, the antiagathics keep a small group of characters alive as they cross interstellar distances FTL so that we lose all sense of historical process. In Genesis, despite the resurrection of Christian Brannock and Laurinda Ashcroft, Poul Anderson presents not only future history but also future geology and galactography.