Innocence Lost
About
By the 25th century, death is a solved problem. A human mind is a quantum waveform, archived and poured into a fresh cloned body whenever the old one wears out — and eighty billion deathless souls now crowd a single exhausted Earth.
Brigadier General Greg Body has a way out: a red dwarf called L 98-59, thirty-five light-years away, with a world that might be green. But Greg has just been forced out of the very corporation he founded — Corpus Ad Astra — by MOMI, the artificial superintelligence the markets installed to run it. So he stakes everything on the expedition itself, freezing his crew into the archive for a relativistic crossing the odds-makers price at a million to one.
Thirty-five years later they wake around a new sun, watched over by DADDIE — an AI with a baseball coach's heart and an unshakable loyalty to the people in his care. The planet they name Aurora Dawn is no Eden: hostile jungle, monstrous fauna, and a saboteur already moving among them. Because back in Sol, MOMI may need this colony to fail.
Light-years from any help, a handful of the deathless will discover what immortality truly costs — and witness the price of innocence lost.
Praise for this book
I liked that the author kept the science "hard" based on extrapolations and constructs that grow from our current knowledge. The story reads well even if the science isn't your thing. You care about the characters and the plot twists of what's going to happen next. The idea of "decanting" one's consciousness into a new body could lead to a discussion of ethics and immortality that could last for hours. This book is in the best classic sci-fi tradition.