Is there anything else you would recommend be discussed before I make that initial payment and set the ball in motion?
Sure, the fact that Ben Best experimented on a patient, ruining his perfusion (Emphasis mine):
My dear friend and mentor Curtis Henderson was little more than straight frozen because CI President Ben Best had this idea that adding polyethylene glycol to the CPA solution would inhibit edema. Now the thing is, Ben had been told by his own researchers that PEG was incompatible with DMSO containing solutions, and resulted in gel formation. Nevertheless, he decided he would try this out on Curtis Henderson. He did NOT do any bench experiments, or do test mixes of solutions, let alone any animal studies to validate that this approach would in fact help reduce edema (it doesn’t). Instead, he prepared a batch of this untested mixture, and AFTER it gelled, he tried to perfuse Curtis with it.
Mike Darwin believes they are providing substandard care, certainly not enough to ensure the possibility of revival.
And they go pretty badly. Go to: http://cryonics.org/refs.html#cases and start reading the case reports posted there. That’s pretty much my working definition of horrible. It seems apparent to me that “just getting frozen” is now all that is necessary for a ticket to tomorrow, and that anything else that is done is “just gravy,” and probably unnecessary to a happy outcome.
And the fact that they are licensed as a cemetery, and at any time the state can decide that cryonics doesn’t work and thaw everyone.
I cannot believe nobody has recommended David Zindell yet! His work is a masterpiece of transhumanist fiction.
His Requiem for Homo Sapiens series is preceded by a short story Shanidar, you should read it first to get a taste of what’s next. If you want more, then the next four books are:
Neverness
The Broken God (My personal favorite)
The Wild (IMHO the worst of the series, but Nikolos Daru Ede is just lovable)
War in Heaven
I’ll second After Life, it’s very short but definitely one of my favorite pieces of h+ fiction. The work of Cordwainer Smith (He only wrote a novel and a few short stories) could also be considered transhumanist fiction, as it includes genetically-engineered super-furries.
Sirius, by Olaf Stapledon, is also a very, very good (And rather depressing) novel about an uplifted dog. In the short story deparment, my personal favorite (Even better than Shanidar) is Fermi’s Urbex Paradox, a real must-read about a posthuman who travels around the galaxy investigating the remains of civilizations and provides an answer for the Fermi Paradox. Crystal Nights, by Greg Egan, is also good.
Full list