Immortality in fiction

For most of literary history, the dominant perspective has been that the desire for immortality is misguided, albeit strong; among the posited drawbacks are ennui, loneliness, and social stagnation.

This story was then reworked over and over again by numerous authors across the centuries, well past the end of the Middle Ages and into the 1800s, with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Alexandre Dumas each making their own version which both remain unfinished.

[9] Progress in the field of medicine inspired science fiction stories about immortality in the late 1800s and early 1900s; most of these took a dim view of the prospect of eternal life but more positive attitudes also appeared.

[4][9] By the 1930s, opinions were divided into camps with favourable and unfavourable views on immortality, with authors such as Neil R. Jones and Laurence Manning writing stories where it presents opportunities and others such as D. D. Sharp and Damon Knight depicting it as a cause of stagnation.

[10] Science fiction occasionally features immortality not of living beings, but of the entire universe by overcoming the issues caused by entropy preventing self-perpetuation; the 1972 novel The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov is one example.

[9] Immortality is sometimes used to enable telling stories that span a period of time longer than a normal human lifespan without replacing the main characters.

[9][10][13] Some authors assume that scientific progress will eventually lead to immortality, and for this reason humans living in the far future are often depicted as having attained this goal, including in Arthur C. Clarke's 1956 novel The City and the Stars.

[2][11][17] Immortality is accomplished by selective breeding and eugenics in works like the 1942 novel Methuselah's Children by Robert A. Heinlein and the 1930 novel Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon.

[2][7][27] Prior to the first successful blood transfusions, some stories in the late 1800s featured the idea that such procedures would have a rejuvenating effect granting extended lifespans, including Robert Duncan Milne's A Man Who Grew Young Again from 1887; Georges Eekhoud's 1884 story Le coeur de Tony Wandel (Tony Wandel's Heart) uses heart transplants in a similar manner.

[31] In the 2005 short story "The Reincarnated Giant" by Chinese author Wang Jinkang, immortality is attainable by replacing aged body parts one at a time.

Examples include George R. R. Martin's 1974 short story "A Song for Lya", F. Paul Wilson's 1976 novel Healer, and Anne McCaffrey's 1982 novel Crystal Singer.

[3][13] One version of this concept involves the uploaded mind being conscious inside the machine, as in William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy starting with the 1984 novel Neuromancer.

The argument that it should be no more unappealing than having artificial body parts is made in Damien Broderick's 2002 novel Transcension, while in John Crowley's 1979 novel Engine Summer it is viewed as a type of imprisonment.

[43] In Frederik Pohl's 1977–2004 novel series the Heechee Saga, one character enjoys the capabilities afforded by having vast computational power available directly to the mind, whereas another dreads the prospect of serving the entirety of a millennia-long prison sentence.

[7][10][45] Science fiction writers have generally had a pessimistic outlook on this idea, foreseeing various problems;[46] immortality does not become available within the promised time frame in Clifford D. Simak's 1967 novel Why Call Them Back from Heaven?,[7] everything works as intended but society has changed for the worse in the intervening period in Anders Bodelsen's 1969 novel Frysepunktet (Freezing Point),[9][45][47] and the preserved bodies are exploited for their organs in Larry Niven's 1973 short story "The Defenseless Dead".

Several stories exist in which universal immortality is caused by the personification of Death being (temporarily) incapacitated in some way, including T. F. Powys' 1931 novel Unclay and the 1939 film On Borrowed Time.

[10][24] Science fiction tends to explore the means by which immortality is attained and occasionally the consequences for individual people, whereas fantasy usually delves more into the enduring societal effects and questions of morality.

[3][9][10] While remaining forever childlike in spirit as well as body makes J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan carefree and joyful, it also leaves him self-centred and unable to form meaningful lasting relationships.

[12][65][66] Regularly recurring (and thus, functionally, anterograde) amnesia is a side-effect of immortality in a different way in John R. Pierce's 1944 short story "Invariant", the consequence of restoring both the body and the mind to a previous state, while one-time (and thus functionally retrograde) amnesia is a side-effect of an immortality treatment in Christopher Priest's 1981 novel The Affirmation,[67][68] and continuous loss of the oldest memories due to the brain's storage capacity being exceeded appears in Michael Flynn's 1994 short story "Melodies of the Heart".

[69] In Richard Cowper's 1983 short story "The Tithonian Factor", it is discovered that the afterlife is real, to the chagrin of those who had already acquired immortality when the discovery was made.

[4][9] Similarly, the aforementioned Le Grand Secret depicts a character having a strong aversion to the prospect of immortality because it would preclude the reincarnation necessary to attain enlightenment according to their Hindu faith.

[21] On the other hand, the absence of reproduction among immortals is also depicted as causing population-wide problems in some works—one example being societal stagnation in Algis Budrys' 1954 short story The End of Summer—and in David H. Keller's 1934 novel Life Everlasting the people demand an antidote to restore mortality and fertility both.

[78][79][80] In Egyptian author Tawfiq al-Hakim's 1947 short story "In the Year One Million", a future society that has eliminated death and disease is also devoid of love and the arts, leading the populace to rise up to reverse these developments in order to regain meaning; al-Hakim's 1958 play Voyage to Tomorrow was based on the short story and expands on its themes.

[3][30][87] In the 1974 novella "Born with the Dead" by Robert Silverberg, immortality is attained by being resurrected after death, and those that have gone through that procedure become estranged from the rest of society due to the emotional effects.

A notable exception is George Bernard Shaw's 1921 story Back to Methuselah, which was repudiated by Karel Čapek who included a counterargument in the preface to his 1925 play The Makropoulos Secret.

[9][10] The immortal life of The Man from Earth is portrayed as neither a curse nor a blessing, in contrast to writer Jerome Bixby's previous work on immortality—the 1969 Star Trek episode "Requiem for Methuselah".

[88][95][96] Jack Vance's 1956 novel To Live Forever reflects the author's belief that immortality is not inherently either good or bad, but rather that it depends on the surrounding circumstances.