Comprising a novel, 59 essays, and a screenplay, John Likides‘ “Athanasia: Humanity across the Multiverse” is a blueprint for our species’ maturation. The novel features a Mars-astronaut couple (a Scandinavi-an-American surfer and a Tibetan-American woman) and a visionary Tibetan-American physicist (the surfer’s mentor and the woman’s uncle) who summon the galaxy’s apex civilization, which clones worthy deceased humans and tests them on an alien Earth-like planet where dinosaur-like creatures with primitive tech tempt cloned humans with genocide. The essays range from peren-nial questions (consciousness, knowledge, the mind-body problem, etc) to more recent ones (quantum mechanics, alternate universes, Black Lives Matter, American exceptionalism, global warming, the Mars frontier, etc).