Lost Voices 4: The Godwhale by T. J. Bass
The Godwhake
By T. J. Bass
24 Apr, 2000
Lost Voices
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The Godwhale
T.J. Bass
Ballantine Books [1974]
281 pages
Synopsis: Larry Dever, several centuries in the future on an Earth with about 35 billion people, manages to get himself badly injured on a vacation. Too severely damaged for the technology of the day to cure completely [Having been more or less cut in two], he opts for Temporary Suspension, hoping to be woken in a future era with the ability to make him whole again. He is revived a few centuries later but while the method exists to give him a whole body, the method [raising a clone and using it for parts] seems unethical to him and re-opts for TS, missing a chance to join a seeding mission to Procyon.
Two thousand years pass. The Earth is occupied by the Hive, a world city covering all of the land and filled with 3.5 trillion four-toed nebbishes, the malnourished and degenerate descendants of current day humanity. The Hive has no room for useless people like Larry and it re-awakens him in order to urge him to commit suicide.