The environment was something of a shift for Drake, who had spent the previous seven years as the medical response director of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Though it was the longtime leader in cryonics, Alcor was still a small nonprofit. It had been freezing the bodies and brains of its members, with the idea of one day bringing them back to life, since 1976. The foundation, and cryonics in general, had long survived outside of mainstream acceptance. Typically shunned by the scientific community, cryonics is best known for its appearance in sci-fi films like 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Max More runs Alcor, an American company which, in exchange for $200,000, will store your corpse in liquid nitrogen until the science exists to revive you. Tim Cannon is a computer programmer who implanted a device the size of a pack of cards into his arm, without the aid of anaesthetics. Zoltan Istvan recently ran for US president and publicised his campaign by driving across the country in a huge vehicle modified to look like a coffin. These are among the unusual individuals Mark O'Connell interviews in his travelogue-style exploration of transhumanism, the movement that campaigns for the direct incorporation of technology into our bodies and minds, and strives to remove ageing as a cause of death. "What are my chances, would you say, of living to a thousand?" the author asks Aubrey de Grey, an established figure in this strange world: "I would say perhaps a little better than fifty-fifty," is the serious reply.

Narratives are made by the artful omission of facts. Never was this maxim more evident than in a gullible feature story that landed on the front page of the New York Times last fall, about a young woman's last-ditch bid for life extension as she succumbed to the ravages of brain cancer. A sober look at the case would have revealed it to be but the latest botched mortuary procedure conducted by a gang of creepy scam artists. Instead, through the good graces of the Times, this grim tale was spun into an inspirational saga of one person's courageous quest for a second chance at life, aided by medical visionaries on the verge of miraculous technological breakthroughs. Kim Suozzi died at age twenty-three in January 2013. After her first diagnosis, twenty-one months earlier, Suozzi chose to become one of the youngest people ever[*] to undergo an expensive form of ritualistic corpse mutilation called cryonic preservation. In pop culture, cryonics is perhaps best known as the plot device that transports the schlubby pizza delivery guy in Matt Groening's animated series Futurama into the thirty-first century. The decades-old quack procedure, which involves freezing corpse parts for later resuscitation, was for a long time apocryphally associated with such wealthy eccentrics as Walt Disney. It then caused a scandal in 2002 when it was widely reported that the body of baseball great Ted Williams had gone into deep freeze against the wishes of some in his family. In recent years, cryonics has regained an entirely undue aura of respectability as the thought leaders of Silicon Valley have trained their enterprising, disruptive vision on the conquest of disease and death.[**] Suozzi, an agnostic libertarian and aspiring neuroscientist, began taking cryonics seriously after discovering the work of the futurologist Ray Kurzweil through a cognitive science class at Truman State University in Missouri. After surgery and other treatments failed to stop the growth of her brain tumor, Suozzi determined that upon death she--or rather, her head--would be frozen and stored for decades, centuries, or millennia in the hope that one day, diligent, wonder-working doctors would transplant her consciousness into a new, healthy body, or perhaps onto a high-capacity hard drive. As a tech-savvy millennial, Suozzi turned to the chat website Reddit for help in raising the 80,000 she needed to fulfill her last wish. That got her well on her way, with about 7,000 reportedly raised.