Sci-fi book about cryogenics and how love is forbidden.

[Rachelj]

The plot starts with the main character, male, choosing to be frozen until future medicine can cure his illness/disease. The woman who shows him around the facility is the woman he ends up falling in love with throughout the book. You can choose a specific year or date you want to be unfrozen. While he’s recovering he gets a “job” at the facility and his job is to look at peoples memories and either keep or destroy them I believe. The doctors don’t have the need to eat or sleep, everything they need is replaced by a pill they take/a cube they eat or something. They can travel really fast through the facility by a pod. I remember on the back of the cover it said how either love is a sin, against the law, and suicide is illegal or something. Please help! Thank you.

 

[Pete_100]

Possibly a book I skimmed through years ago. I didn't read it all the way through, but got the gist of it. It was called The Man Who Came Back by Jan Carew. (Bibliography here). I can't find any information about it online. From what I remember: the protagonist is revived from some sort of suspended animation. His illness can't be cured, but there is medicine that will keep him alive. The society is a dystopia. State propaganda in the form of comic books is compulsory reading. He reads a comic about a "state hero" who detects a young couple who had an unauthorized baby. The couple are arrested, and the baby taken to some unknown fate. At the end the woman he loves is killed or disappeared by the state. He resolves to stop taking his medicine, and thus die soon.

I don't know about the other bits, such as a job reviewing memories, or food in pill form. I don't even know if suicide is specifically prevented, but he must have had some reason for selecting that particular way to die.

It's a pretty obscure book, out of print, and I can't find a copy for sale on the usual sites.