Who Wants to Live Forever: Five SFF Tales of Immortality

[james_davis_nicoll]

Who Wants to Live Forever: Five SFF Tales of Immortality

Comments

AKA... Ooops! All Zelazny!?

[connactic]

I think the list would be longer than five, though.

[petrea_mitchell]

To Your Eternity is another manga about an immortal being and the melancholy of being surrounded by humans with short lives. Personally I only made it through a few episodes of the anime adaptation, but it does have a lot of fans.

[oursin]

Karel Capek's The Makropulos Affair (source of opera by Janacek) is about prolonged life, although it could be extended in the individual by a further dose of the potion which is the source: Emilia's 'extended life has led to exhausted apathy and a sense of cynical futility.... [but} she is afraid of death'.

Simone de Beauvoir's All Men are Mortal is about a man granted immortality (likewise through alchemy) but should probably be described as 'existential fable' rather than sff

[dormouse1953]

I've read that The Makropulos Affair (which was the first opera I ever saw staged, over 50 years ago) was Capek's answer to Shaw's Back to Methuselah, which posited a longer life would be great for mankind. (And I saw that staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company about 20 years ago.)

[oursin]

According to the Wikipedia entry, Capek commented on the coincidence of the two works appearing around the same time but reaching different conclusions, which implies that it was not a direct response.

I've also remembered the 1939 novel by Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer involving a search for immortality - it turns out that the formula does exist, but it has caused the two people who took it around the C18th to regress to an ape-like condition in reverse evolution.

[jreynolds197]

Something that Charlie Stross retweeted: "This too shall not pass". What happens when you have a very long-lived pet?

ISTR reading that when Gabriel García Márquez was a young boy, there was a parrot in his household that had the habit of singing snippets of revolutionary songs. As in, from the Colombian war of independence. Which was in 1819.

https://twitter.com/Guinz/status/1577364598273212416

[scott_sanford]

I liked comment #17 on Tor. Long lived characters should have psychological differences from younger people and not all authors are good about showing this.

One good point: "Even the most static of personalities would start to notice potential signs of upheaval or drama and be reacting long before normal people... They would not behave like a giddy school-child at the slightest shift in circumstance – or like a love-sick teenager at each new relationship." - Peter

It's not always easy for authors, particularly when the story includes more than one very old character, but 'hidebound and clueless' has definitely been over-used.

[estrevan]

This makes me think of Cyteen. It’s all very implicit - like most of her worldbuilding - but it’s clear Cherryh thought about the psychological effects of longevity treatment and how they shape the politics of the setting.

[mindstalk]

Though the differences can also depend on the means of immortality. Are you a sixty year old who manages to avoid dying? Or are you preserved with eternal youth, possibly including young brain flexibility? As your memory fills up, do you lose the oldest memories, or do you remember childhood and present and blur out the in-between? Or do you have some magical memory that can just keep expanding (Tolkien elves, Queen Albia). Do you accumulate physical and mental scars and damages, or fully regenerate? Are you a lone immortal who has to hide and watch everyone else die, or part of a healthy community?

[james_davis_nicoll]

Tor dot com article 336, 2022 article 55