Fiction is about life and death, our lives and deaths.
"No matter how long a life you might win for yourself, who in the end escaped the nets of Ran?" (p. 72)
Drowned sailor are caught in the nets of Ran. Everyone has an appointment in Samara.
This reflection is relevant to works by two of Poul Anderson's colleagues, James Blish and Robert Heinlein.
Blish's Okies have anti-agathics which prevent death by disease or old age but Blish wants to make the point that even they must die sooner or later so he shows them surviving until the end of the universe which, for fictional purposes, he brings closer to the present than expected. Time triumphs.
By contrast, the implication of Heinlein's Methuselah's Children is that Lazarus Long, a mutant, will survive indefinitely. Neil Gaiman's Hob Gadling manages this as well but that is in a work of fantasy.
Anderson's mutant "immortals" in The Boat Of A Million Years agree to rendezvous after a million years but how many of them will survive that long?
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
To put it another way, using an Anderson title for one of his stories, "The Horn of Time the Hunter" pursues all of us.
I agree, it doesn't seem plausible the eight "immortal" Survivors of THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS can live a literal million years.
Ad astra! Sean
Or nine?
Kaor, Paul!
I'm almost sure it was only eight.
Ad astra! Sean
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