Friends Come in Boxes

by Michael G. Coney

Essef - The problem of immortality was solved in the 21st century: at forty, your brain was transferred to the head of a six month old child. Thus you gained another forty years of active life, untl you could do it all over again. But then the birthrate fell, and a growing horde of brains waited in the Friendship Boxes for host bodies...

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

160 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published May 1, 1973

About the author

Michael Greatrex Coney was born in Birmingham, England and educated at King Edward's School.

He started a career as a chartered accountant and went on to become a management Consultant. Then he went into the catering business, managing an inn in south Devon with his wife, Daphne for three years and a hotel in the West Indies for another three. He worked for Financial Services in the B.C. Forest Service for seventeen years before retiring .

He Passed away 4 November 2005. peacefully of Cancer (Mesothelioma). He was married with three children and lived on Vancouver Island.

Reviews

[Karl · Rating 4 out of 5]

DAW Collectors #56

Cover Artist: John Holmes

Name: Coney, Michael Greatrex, Birthplace: Birmingham, Warwickshire, England, UK
Birthdate: 28 September 1932 - 4 November 2005

Alternate Names: Jennifer Black, Michael Coney, Michael Greatrex Coney.

"Friends Come in Boxes" is comprised of a prologue that introduces the frame story and world, five vignettes with interrelated characters and situations that form the propaganda pamphlet against the System, and an epilogue that describes what has happened since. Two of the five vignettes were previously published in 1973 in Worlds of If, “The Never Girl” and “A Woman and Her Friend.” The figure of Phillip Ewell, an Android who asked the pamphlet to be written, plays a role in all five vignettes.

Overpopulation pressures cause entire cities, such as Manila in the year 2053, to starve to death. In this world Theo Kleinmaker’s scheme of Compulsory Transfer gains widespread acceptance. At the age of fifty (soon dropped to forty) every person must attend a Transfer Center “where his brain will be removed and his body destroyed”. The brain is then placed in the “adapted cranium of a six-month-old child”, the person in the host body will then go through a second psychical childhood. And again, when they reach the required physical age the process repeats. A perverse immortality.

Part I “Creche”
Part II “The Never Girl” (1973).
Part III “Menagerie”.
Part IV “A Woman and Her Friend” (1973)
Part V “Charity Run.

Recommended for fans of 70's SF.

If you enjoyed this try these other Coney novels.

" Mirror Image" (1972)
"Charisma" (1975) "Brontomek!" (1976)
the collection "Monitor Found in Orbit" (1974).

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Friends Come in Boxes is a fix-up novel comprised of five related stories with a prologue and epilogue added for framing. Two of the stories were originally published in Ejler Jakobsson's Worlds of If magazine's early 1973 issues, and I'll bet the others would have been published there too if time had permitted before DAW's release in May. It's a deftly handled social satire about the length that people seem willing to go to prolong their youth and lives in general. (And he showed how to solve the population explosion... but there's always a cost.) A little dated in some areas, but still a good read.

[iambehindu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Friends Come In Boxes is that quintessentially pleasant SF novel. It harks on all the reasons why I love Barrington Bayley. It’s not trying to say anything particularly literary; it has no hidden meanings or layered interpretations, and it’s not trying to make some compelling prediction about what our future may look like. It is, first and foremost, just a damn good story—entertaining without exhaustion, all the right punches right when you wanted them. Writers like Coney and Bayley are able to approach the unbelievable with aplomb, all from the sheer degree of entertainment surrounding their writing.

Friends functions as a fix-up of sorts. The novel contains five vignettes surrounding the lives of characters that are cleverly interwoven through each story. The premise is joyfully ridiculous. In a far future, population growth has become unstable, natural resources are exhausted, and food supplies are unable to keep up with billions of hungry citizens. The city of Manila starves to death, leaving the world governments with few options other than an authoritarian regime. A new law is codified: All babies born are to be turned over to the state by the age of six months and euthanized. Easily enough, the population rate goes down. Who would want to have a child only to have the government ritualistically murder them? Ritualistic? Ah-ha! Enter immortality. Coney is pulling all the punches. Just as babies have an expiration, so must the adults. At the age of 40, provided that you have committed no crimes, your brain will be lifted out and placed into the skull of a fresh baby, allowing you to continue your life with a new shell. Though, it’s not always so simple. Immediate transfer from adult to infant is reserved for the privileged class: governmental employees, doctors, psychologists, etc. The rest are not so lucky. If you do not choose “Total Death,” your brain may be stored in a box, suspended in liquid, and you even get a little speaker you can communicate out of. These boxes are affectionately called "Friends” and may live restlessly together on shelves, awaiting years for a new body, or may be adopted and carried around by citizens for various reasons. Coney’s stories follow these friends, the people, and the folks on the outskirts of cities who do not abide by the rules of the new regime. The story is told as an account, a Gulag Archipelago of sorts, and you, the reader, are holding the very rebellious propaganda that may very well destroy the System.

Coney is at top form here. He is comedic, strange, heartwarming, aloof, whimsical, and at times unexpectedly violent and dark. Nothing to complain about—just good fun.

[N. M. D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Friends Come in Boxes displays my favorite aspect of SF: the absurd, ridiculous, and over-the-top "what-if".

What if we decided that prolonging older lives trumped creating new ones? Maybe we'd develop a system that when we turned forty, we transferred our brains into babies and countinued our lives. And in another forty years? We'd do it again. What would we do in the case of falling birthrates? We'd grow android babies in vats. Where would they fall in society as a semi separate species? They'd be undesirable, depsite being better than regular humans. What would we do to clear up space on the transfer waiting list? We'd have an intense legal system that cuts you from brain transfer options for even the most minor crime. What would happen to humanity? Life would stagnate, and we'd become dull and jaded and nothing would be very exciting anymore. And what would happen if there were a waiting list for new bodies. Why, your brain would go in an electronic box, of course, and you'd spend years as a "friend".

This novel (maybe a fix up?) is made up of five loosely connected short stories. Often one begins in sight of the other's ending, but each is a separate story with new characters--with the exception of one, an android named Philip Ewell. This man is the closest thing to moral that this world really has. He wants to help, is not vindictive, even when wronged, and is compassionate.  But, in the spirit of good writing, he also kills babies everyday as a transfer surgeon. But this is the only world he's known, and the morals you've been taught can be hard to overcome.

I really loved this book. It's clearly not a prediction of the future. It's not meant to be feasible or realistic. But it's the kind of fun, weird, twisted world I can really fall into. It inspires me to read more. It inspires me to write more. It's my second Coney and it sure won't be my last.

[asunder_doom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Coney very good. Highly recommend. 4,5 stars.

[Ellen O'Brien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing science fiction, inspired me to write my own piece.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 2 out of 5]

Flimsy premise. The kind of novel I can only regard as a waste of my time once I've finished it; and by that time it is obviously too late.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the future, when you reach age 40, you are required to have your brain transferred into the head of a baby (surgically altered to accommodate an adult brain). Babies are confiscated by the government to be used as hosts. After forty more years, you repeat the process, ad infinitum. Thus, you have immortality, as long as you obey the laws. Those who commit an infraction, no matter how minor, are allowed to live out their current lives until their 40th "birthday" but then must undergo total death -- that is, no more transfers. This is an excellent novel (written in the early 1970s) that is frightening on several levels. Highly recommended for fans of nightmare dystopian fiction.

[Toni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found this book at a local Goodwill either just before middle school or high school. Seemed interesting and followed into the Sci-Fi like books I was into at the time ( I was really into the Tripod Trilogy at the time). Bought it and read during the summer. It did not take me long at all to read. I could not but it down! After discovering Ray Bradbury (thanks to my Sophomore English class) I finally found something to parallel it to. This book became my stepping stone into similar authors. It was one of my favorite books, sadly I lost my copy when hurricane Rita hit in 2005 and a tree landed in my room. I am now on the search for a "new" copy. If you like Ray Bradbury or similar authors I recommend this book.

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The entire world being okay with killing all babies so that the current population can transplant their brains into them for immortality was hard enough to swallow, but that's premise. It's background. It's ignored so that the story can be told.

Which makes the total mismanagement of the system after that all the more baffling. Why was no effort made to incentivize having babies? Or even make it a requirement? Why was the age of transfer LOWERED?

Ultimately, I just don't understand what the author was trying to say. Killing babies is wrong? The quest for immortality is inherently flawed? Coney set up a very specific, very unlikely scenario as if to say "look at this terrible thing I made! Isn't it awful?"

Well, yes, it was awful. But what does that have to do with us?

[Brown Robin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a very 1970s future, and a story in the tone of the very British cozy catastrophe. Sci-fi wise the basic premise is kind of uploaded personalities adjacent. The story is poignant and bittersweet and autumnal, and all those downbeat things, done quite well by Coney here. I know enough about Cold War Britain to assert that Coney was writing what he knew. (He emigrated early in his life.)

There are some people who still worry about the human consequences of the abundance of human beings, and this short novel provides us with a sense of the possibilities of future developments, and the cost of both disease and treatment.

[Dan Piponi · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first I found the premise...well...idiotic. And the writing is so parochial - set in the 23rd century but feels like the 1970s England I remember from my childhood. But then I realised this isn't a serious hard SF novel but a (dark) comedy, somewhere on the spectrum between Inside No. 9 and Black Mirror. Like those shows, each of the five stories in the book has a clever little twist making them all worth reading.

BTW I was led to this book because I read Gary Numan was a fan. Some lyrics from My Love is a Liquid:

Did you know that my love is a liquid?
I could talk to me for years
I can't speak to you at all
Did you know that friends come in boxes?

[Nic · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know this book isn't a 5 for everyone, it just hit me at the perfect time. I picked it up on a whim. I was walking out of the library and the cover caught my attention so I threw it in my pile. Because I didn't have any preconceived ideas .. I just read it. I loved it. Entertaining all the way through. I honestly felt several times ... how is this not a movie. The idea is off the wall enough that it would be a crazy sci-fi film.

[Joachim Boaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com...

"“KEEP A CLEAN SHEET OR YOU’LL END UP AS MEAT” (72)

Michael G. Coney’s focus on everyday struggles—the normal minutiae of life—reached wonderful heights in the lyrical paean to youth and youthful travails Hello Summer, Goodbye (variant title: Rax) (1975). While the true import of Hello Summer, Goodbye‘s narrative only slowly [...]"

[Egghead · Rating 4 out of 5]

immortality-
recycled brains in babies
and red-marked androids

[Magic Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Nobody died anymore, they just went into a box and sat there, complaining."

A somewhat compilation of tragic realities of being human in a time when we have successfully achieved "immortality" through mind transfer. It's quirky but at the same time pretty dark. A generally great read with the good vs evil plot twists being the most enjoyable parts.

[Alex Storer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Friends Come In Boxes is actually a series of connected short stories, presented as a dossier on several cases leading up to a revolt against the regime. Written in 1973, the book deals with over-population, a subject I dare say would be regarded as taboo in this day and age. In Coney’s dystopian future, once you get to the age of forty, your brain is transferred to a new host – a child body, which you then grow into for the next forty years, and so on. Society has achieved immortality, while humans are intermingled with androids, who are ‘grown’ and then made available as hosts, to combat the dwindling number of babies being born.

The story is terrifying and harrowing, as well as having an underlying sense of humour to it – let’s face it, there is something mildly entertaining about a talking brain stuck in a box while it awaits a new host body!

I would rate Friends Come In Boxes as one of the best pieces of 1970s SF that I have read in a long time. Why this book isn’t better known is beyond me, and its a great shame that it isn’t currently in print (though it is available as an ebook). That said, I quickly settled into my tatty third-hand first edition courtesy of AbeBooks, and once I got started, I could not put it down.

[Caitlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A classic of scifi, I still think about it often. While the ending disappointed and there's the usual sexism of scifi from this era, I found the concept and the characters wholly interesting. It deserves to be better known.

[Steven · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cool concept, poor execution. The authors book Hello Summer, Goodbye was really an amazing book. None of the stellar writing in that novel is present here, unfortunately.