Monday, 30 January 2023

Methuselah And The Boat Of A Million Years

Robert Heinlein's immortal man, Lazarus Long, is in his Future History whereas Poul Anderson's equivalent character, Hanno, is in a separate novel. Both are mutants. Long has lived through the early twentieth century into the Future History whereas Hanno lives through history into the future. Heinlein's title, Methuselah's Children, refers to the Biblical long-lived man whereas Anderson's title, The Boat Of A Million Years, quotes from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

I identified a "Methuselan Trilogy":

Back To Methuselah George Bernard Shaw
Methuselah's Children by Heinlein
"Requiem for Methuselah," Star Trek episode by Jerome Bixby

- but I have only just discovered that Heinlein quotes from Shaw's preface to Back To Methuselah earlier in his Future History.

Hanno informs or reminds us that:

"'Alexandros destroyed Tyre...'"
-Poul Anderson, The Boat Of A Million Years (London, 1991), I, 1, p. 11.

- whereas Manse Everard of the Time Patrol reflects merely that Tyre "...would die..."

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Not directly relevant to your comments here, but I also thought of Anderson's WORLD WITHOUT STARS, where Hugh Valland, benefiting from an artificial "immortalizer," lived from the late 20th century into the far future. And, there's Anderson's posthumously pub. FOR LOVE AND GLORY, where, for those who wished it, people could live indefinitely by taking rejuvenation treatments every forty years or so.

WORLD WITHOUT STARS, THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS, and FOR LOVE AND GLORY, is a Methuselan trilogy by Anderson. And the Danellians gave their Time Patrol agents life extending treatments. In the Technic stories, antisenescence treatments enabled people to live about 100-110 years in good health. Similarly, the HARVEST OF STARS books has people being able to live 130 years (Lunarians could live about 140-50 years).

Ad astra! Sean