Who Wants to Live Forever?

I have, from time to time, played with the notion of immortality in my fiction. A novel or five here, a novelette and stories there. Not even counting vampires or zombies or gods, I have walked characters down that long road a few times. Hardly the only writer to do so — it’s a fascinating subject, the idea of living for centuries, maybe forever. 

Who wants to live forever? 

I can’t recall the last time I was bored. Would I become jaded after a few hundred years? Maybe. Maybe not.  

First time I wrote about it? My third short story, “An Eye for Detail,” in Asimov’s Magazine, Sept/Oct, 1978. How, I wondered, would somebody recognize an immortal? I thought my answer fairly clever — their efficiency of moment in something as commonplace as dining. 

The psychological aspects are more interesting to me than the cause of the condition — whether it be magic, elixirs, or technology — those are the suspension of disbelief a reader must need accept. That done, the thoughts of an immortal becomes the focus. How does one deal with watching their family, friends, strangers come and go? What memories remain, which fade, because five hundred or a thousand years of living day-to-day run out of room inside your head?

Consider the experience of laying your hand on the casket of your great-great-grandchild, who has died of old age; of living the days of carts drawn by oxen down muddy roads, to jet aircraft spanning the globe; of being older than anyone you meet, anywhere.

One my favorite explorations of the subject was a novelette for F&SF, The Master of Chang Gen published in September, 1999. Twenty years after my first such tale, the story follows Wu, a priest in an alternate-world China, who fights demons. Become an anachronism, and weary, Wu tracks Death down. 

I won’t fight you, Death says. You aren’t ready to go yet. 

You aren’t afraid?

No. Death fears nothing but eternity.

What brings this up? 

A friend died, young enough to be my son, and it reminded me yet again of my own mortality. And it also reminded me of what I believe is the central truth in the work I do: 

There are only two things worth writing about — love and death. 

All of us will know the latter; if we are lucky, we will experience the former.

Life is, alas, short. Live in the moment. Eat the perfect strawberry.