Seven issues of short stories, published during the late 1980's over three and one half years, two decades before the readership for them even existed. Here are stories about what happened in cryonics and uploading once the techniques of nanotechnology reached a point where self-replicating machines could do things that still, today, lie in the future, but not so far as one might think.
About the Author: We (Fred and Linda Chamberlain) have more connections with cryonics than simply as authors of the majority of the stories you find here, written & first published in the late 1980's. We met as coworkers on a committee to host the 3rd Annual Conference on Cryonics in Los Angeles (May, 1970). Since then we've founded the Alcor Society for Solid State Hypothermia (now known as the Alcor Life Extension Foundation), published the first detailed procedures manual for carrying out cryonic suspensions (in 1972), developed specialized equipment for cryonics suspension, helped Trans Time, Inc. get organized, and In Lake Tahoe during the 1980's we hosted annual "Lake Tahoe Life Extension Festivals" that were nationally attended and provided an opportunity for technical presentations by cryonics people and others. Eric Drexler was one of our speakers, just before his Engines of Creation was first published. And, that's the period during which we wrote and published LifeQuest stories. Along the way, we helped two of our parents get into cryonic suspension. Fred's dad was first, in 1976, the first neuropreservation patient in history. Linda's mom, in 1990, was the highest biological-viability case up to that time. There's a more complete cryonics history on us in Wikipedia (just search our names there), written by Ben Best, President of the Cryonics Institute (that's our organization now; a very complex set of circumstances caused us to part ways with Alcor in 2001). As for our non-cryonics backgrounds (who would care about that?), we might mention that Fred's electrical engineering education predates the transistor, notwithstanding which he later served on design and mission development teams at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for over a decade. Linda Chamberlain was also with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for years, and was fortunate enough to have been on the Space Astrophysics Team at the time active volcanoes were discovered on Io (one of Jupiter's moons) during the Voyager Mission. Linda (before she and Fred got together) had taken up refuge in a remote canyon in Idaho, building a cabin there to escape a society that seemed to have little interest in either philosophy or staying alive. Before Fred found out about cryonics, he'd spent five years in Navy bomb disposal and nuclear weapons disposal. What's the purpose of all this anyway? You're either going to find the stories interesting and meaningful, or not, right? (We hope you'll like them!)