Volume one of the series, The Cassandra Complex, is set in the year 2041. It tells the story of the belated public revelation of an accidental discovery made by a biologist named Morgan Miller while conducting experiments in the genetic engineering of mice. Miller’s discovery had allowed him to produce a number of mice whose life spans were much greater than those of mice produced by natural selection. Although he had some reason to suppose that a similar genetic transformation might have a similar effect in humans, the process had certain awkward limitations which discouraged him from reporting his findings, even to his closest friends, while he searched for a means to overcome them.

Having grown old without ever solving the problems associated with his life-extending process, Miller had begun to investigate the possibility of handing his results over to an institution capable of carrying on his work. Unfortunately, an imperfect rumor of his long-kept secret had already leaked out, and this move provoked precipitate action by people intent on claiming the rewards of the research for themselves. (I am being deliberately vague here because the novel is framed as a mystery, and I do not want to spoil it for any reader who may want to go on to read it.)

One of the institutions contacted by Miller was the Ahasuerus Foundation, which had been set up some years earlier by a man named Adam Zimmerman to conduct research in technologies of longevity and suspended animation. Zimmerman had been one of the first people to place himself in cryonic suspension before suffering a natural death in the hope that he might one day be revived into a world which had the technological means to keep him alive indefinitely. The continuing work of the Ahasuerus Foundation is a recurrent element in the subsequent books in the series, whose underlying theme is the gradual evolution of a whole series of longevity technologies, each one of which brings humankind a further step closer to “authentic emortality.” Emortality — a term coined by Alvin Silverstein — signifies a state of being in which an organism does not age, and is thus potentially capable of living forever, although it remains permanently vulnerable to death by mortal injury (it is preferable to “immortality” as a specification of the plausible ultimate goal of biotechnology and medical science, because immortality implies an absolute invulnerability to death).

The money that enabled Adam Zimmerman to establish the Ahasuerus Foundation was earned in the service of a powerful consortium of multinational corporations known by a set of more or less derogatory nicknames, including the Secret Masters [of the World] and the Hardinist Cabal. Having benefited from the general tendency of capital to become concentrated in the hands of relatively few very large institutions, and the contrivance of a spectacular stock-market crash in the year 2025, this consortium has become the effective owner of the world. Its members have, however, been careful to provide a philosophical justification for their takeover of the world, in terms of an ideology whose most succinct statement can be found in a classic essay by the economist Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons” (first published in Science162 [1968] pp.1243–8, but reprinted many times) — hence the appellation “Hardinist Cabal.”

Hardin’s argument, in brief, is that when land is made generally available for exploitation — as the commons of ancient England were to owners of livestock — it is in the interests of each and every individual to increase the proportion of his own share, with the ultimate result that overexploitation obliterates the resource. Thus have many fertile areas been turned into desert, just as the world’s oceans are presently being depopulated of fish. Only when a resource is privately owned, and its exploitation carefully constrained, can it be protected from devastation. In my future history, this argument — applied to the Earth as a whole — is used as a justification by the discreet board of directors who have usurped effective ownership of all its resources. The more cynical characters, however, regard the position as a mere pose, suspecting that the new breed of allegedly benevolent dictators are, like all their predecessors, far more interested in dictatorship than benevolence.

Volume two, Inherit the Earth, is set in the year 2193, in a world where the preservative labor of complex sets of nanotechnological devices has extended the attainable human life span to at least 150 years. No one is certain how far this figure might be extended, because its limits cannot be ascertained until the relevant time has actually elapsed, but there is a general optimism that people wealthy enough to have access to the best Internal Technology — IT for short — ought to be able to benefit from an “escalator effect,” whereby each new technological advance will give them sufficient additional life span to be around when the next technological breakthrough arrives, and so on.

An ecocatastrophic Crash, complicated by chaotic “plague wars” in which biological weapons were deployed — mostly by unidentifiable aggressors — had earlier culminated in the advent of a number of new diseases whose result, if not their aim, was the universal sterilization of human females. The response to this crisis, securely in place at the beginning of the novel, was the development of artificial wombs in which egg cells stripped from the wombs of as-yet-uninfected females in very large numbers can be safely isolated, fertilized, and brought to term. The biotechnologists credited with the development of this technology were a closely knit team working under the direction of Conrad Helier.

In the world of the novel, therefore, very few children are reared by their biological parents. Although the right to found a family currently recognized by the United Nations Charter of Human Rights is still cherished, it is almost universally accepted that in a world whose citizens have a reasonable expectation of living for a very long time, the right to found a family ought to be exercised posthumously. The novel’s central character, Damon Hart, is the biological son of Conrad Helier, who was born not long after his father’s death and raised by the surviving members of Helier’s research team. When the novel begins, however, he is estranged from his former foster-parents, having rebelled against the expectations they had of the career path he would take.

The plot of the novel describes events following the kidnapping of one of Damon’s foster parents, apparently by members of a disorganized movement called Eliminators, whose modus operandi is to publish accusations that certain individuals are “unworthy of immortality” and call for their assassination. Among the allegations made on this occasion is the claim that Conrad Helier is still alive, in hiding because he was not only the architect of the solution to the final plague but of the plague itself. Damon sets out to make his own investigation of these allegations with the aid of Madoc Tamlin, a man only slightly older than he, who fancies himself something of an outlaw. Damon had befriended Tamlin during the most extreme phase of his rebellion against his foster parents and the surrounding society, and their friendship has survived the strain exerted upon it by their mutual close acquaintance with the volatile Diana Caisson.

With Tamlin’s aid, and the ambivalent encouragement of interested parties within the Hardinist Cabal, Damon contrives to arrive at the truth of the matter before various rival investigators, who include representatives of the Ahasuerus Foundation as well as the police. He and Tamlin are then faced with awkward decisions regarding the uses to which they might put the information they have gained, and the new career opportunities that have opened up for them.