Daryesh can set up a life-tank, make a new body with Vywrddan intelligence and abilities, immortalize that body and transfer his and Laird's linked patterns to it. Here again we encounter fictional "immortality."
Such immortality is either weak or strong. A weakly immortal organism is immune to illness and old age but not to accident or violence. Most sf immortality is weak. Antiagathics preserve James Blish's Okies only until the end of this universe. Darvesh's immortality is also weak. He has already died once. So he is wrong to tell Laird, "'Man, you'll never die!'"
(I think that) John W Campbell once made the deliberately provocative statement that "The first immortal man has already been born," meaning that advances in medical technology in our lifetimes should cause someone's life expectancy to keep ahead of his age. Larry Niven's Lucas Garner, born in 1939, lives to - two hundred and fifty?
Captain Jack in Torchwood, the Doctor Who spin-off, is strongly immortal. Even if burnt to death, he pulls a Lazarus act and is suspected of demonology by the superstitious. In one Torchwood episode, he says, "I am a fixed point in time. That's what the Doctor says." The Torchwood (anagram) organization, founded by Queen Victoria to defend the British Empire against supernatural and extraterrestrial threats, coexists with UNIT, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, with which the Doctor works when he happens to be around.
Neil Gaiman's immortal Englishman, Hob Gadling, survives drowning and starvation because Death has agreed not to come for him. Hob meets an Indian who ate the fruit of immortality, the efficacy of which was demonstrated when an experimental animal survived a fire.
All this imaginative reminiscence over breakfast!
5 comments:
Hi, Paul!
I agree with what Poul Anderson said about John Campbell, that he was a fascinating man willing to speak and think about anything, no matter how outlandish. But, I'm skeptical about what Campbell said about the first immortal man already being alive. Because I am extremely dubious that either "weak" or "strong" immortality is even possible. At most, advances in medical technology might extend human lifespans to a FINITE extent (such as the "antisenescence" we see in the Technic Civilization stories extending lifespans to an average 100 years).
Sean
I don't see that we know enough to say that 'weak' immortality is either definitely possible or definitely impossible. I don't see any reason why it should be impossible to repair aging damage to the body indefinitely, but there might be some currently unknown reason to preclude it.
However 'strong' immortality sounds ridiculous to me. Drop the 'immortal' body into the sun & I see no reason to expect the vaporization to be reversible by any means. I'm not sure that backup copies would count, the experiences between the last backup & the vaporization would still be lost.
Kaor, Jim!
Your first paragraph: I'm still skeptical. I can imagine medical technology making advances and enabling the kind of repairs described. But, for INDEFINITE life? That seems a stretch!
Your second paragraph: I agree.
Ad astra! Sean
Actually my main reservation about the idea of weak immortality was mentioned by Anderson in "World Without Stars". Can you keep accumulating memories & stay sane?
Then there is the issue that the lack of 'strong' immortality will eventually kill you. Rates of accidental death are such that a cohort of 'weak' immortals will have a 'half-life' of at most a few millennia.
Kaor, Jim!
I don't disagree with what you said about our limited capacity for memory storage. Anderson knew of that problem as long ago as "Pact," first pub. in 1951.
Your second paragraph: I agree. Even Hanno and his fellow "natural" immortals from THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS will eventually succumb, one way or another, to dying by violence or accident.
Ad astra! Sean
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