Friday, 4 September 2015

Longevity And Memory

(i) In Poul Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years, mutant immortals must find within themselves an inner discipline to stave off insanity caused by endlessly accumulating memories.

(ii) In Anderson's World Without Stars, immortal beneficiaries of an antithanatic regularly have their memories artificially edited. Thus, at any one time, an immortal retains the general pattern of his identity and a single lifetime's worth of memories but nothing more. This may be why they write journals.

(iii) In Anderson's Time Patrol series, Time Patrol agents have anti-senescence treatment and can also have selected memories erased:

"When this hunt ended...the Patrolman would be almost sorry to have those trills and purrs [of the Exaltationists' language] scrubbed from his brain." (The Shield Of Time, p. 83)

"Eventually, when they had no further use for the knowledge, it would be wiped from them to make room for something else." (p. 203)

In both these cases, the reference is to linguistic knowledge that has been artificially implanted in the first place. Nevertheless, if some memories can be erased, then why not others? Thus, the Time Patrol might have the same solution to the problem of accumulating memories as one set of Anderson's immortals, which would make their perception of time even weirder.

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