Travis Coates

Travis is the novel’s central character, its protagonist and narrator. Five years before the story begins and fatally ill with cancer, he agreed to participate in an experimental surgery to remove his head and, at some point in the future when technology allowed, have it attached to another body. In the novel’s first chapter, begins, he is waking up from the second surgery, which involved the attachment of his head to the body of the recently deceased Jeremy Pratt. The novel tells the story of the various adjustments Travis has to make in a life that is simultaneously old (in the sense that his inner identity is still his: all his memories are fully intact) and brand new (in the sense that in the five years since his “death”, everyone in his life, and indeed the world, has moved on, to varying degrees and in...