A bureaucrat:
"Whether he puts stylus to wax, pen to paper, nowadays types or dictates, he helps maintain the memory of the state."
-Poul Anderson, The Boat Of A Million Years (London, 1991), XVI, p. 341.
(This chapter mentions our friends, Augustus (see also here), HG Wells and President Ataturk.)
A lawyer:
"From time to time he's done other things, but mostly he's been a lawyer of one kind or another.
"People always need lawyers."
-Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Brief Lives (New York, 1994), Chapter 3, p. 2.
There are probably other examples.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Assuming immortals of the kind seen in THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS, the smart thing for such people to do WOULD be live quietly and unobtrusively. Even Hanno, for the most part, did that for thousands of years. He confided his peculiar longevity only to a few non-immortals, Psamtik I of Egypt and Cardinal Richelieu in France.
We see "immortals" in WORLD WITHOUT STARS and FOR LOVE AND GLORY, but those were medico/technological forms of immortality available to most humans who wanted them. Not the kind of anxious secrecy seen in BOAT.
Sean
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