Immortal Employees

World Without Stars.

"Immortal" spacemen live for centuries or even millennia and spend all that time in paid employment in the same kind of work. Can't they save, invest and retire either to leisure activities or to retraining for other kinds of work? It seems an odd kind of existence. Even odder, they preserve their sanity by periodically editing their memories so that they only ever consciously remember a much shorter period, maybe only a few decades, like the equivalent of what used to be a normal working life. Their previous lives and work are recorded somewhere but not in their own conscious memories. Hugh Valland, three thousand years old, recalls his youth, his most recent few years of work and only a few other selected details. He speaks of revisiting old places and visiting new places but even most of the old places will be experienced anew. And, in any case, there is an infinity of new places because the space jump gives access to every galaxy. This has to be the strangest fictional future ever.

In Poul Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years, the small group of mutant immortals have had to solve the memory accumulation problem for themselves and are able to traverse interstellar space at only sub-light speeds so their situation is very different. They propose to part and to reconvene in another million years which I should think is impossible. Will Hugh Valland survive for a million years? Statistically unlikely. But we would have liked to have read some sequels.

In James Blish's Okie cities, unaging policemen, and men in other professions, simply stay in those roles for centuries.