These Immortals

World Without Stars.

Robert Heinlein's Lazarus Long has a gusty laugh. Poul Anderson's Hugh Valland is:

"...big, tough, gusty but good-natured..." (IV, p. 23)

James Blish's John Amalfi sounds like:

"...the father bear in the ancient myth of Goldilocks..."

-James Blish, A Life For The Stars (London, 1974), 5., p. 75 -

- to the juvenile protagonist of Cities in Flight, Volume II. When met, "The fabulous Amalfi..." (12., p. 143) turns out to be short, barrel-shaped, bull-necked and totally bald with huge hands, not as heroic looking a figure as either Long or Valland.

Blish wants to make the point that nothing lasts forever, neither a man with antideath drugs nor even the entire universe. To make this point, he recorded the death of Amalfi in a hunting accident in an early version of his Chronology of Cities in Flight but then had Amalfi living until the end of the universe in The Triumph of Time - but brought that cosmic ending closer to the present for fictional purposes. Thus, Cities in Flight parts company both with The Seedling Stars, which has Adapted Men proliferating through the galaxy over many millennia, and The Quincunx of Time whose characters receive messages from many millennia in the future.

By contrast with Blish, Heinlein wants us to think that Long will never die. Pinero, whose invention can predict dates of death, merely looks at Long and returns his fee without giving him a prediction. Poul Anderson does not usually show the deaths of major characters but covers so much history that van Rijn has to be long dead by the time of Flandry etc. In the bracketed introduction to the concluding chapter of World Without Stars, Argens has died but we are not told about Valland.