Customer Reviews

Immortals

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I have over 1000 anthologies. All anthologies have good stories and stinkers. "Immortals" has only two crummy overly verbose stories not worth reading - Worm That Flies by Aldiss and Mortimer Gray's History of Death by Stableford. Clearly the authors are paid by the word and detract from stories that potentially could have been acceptable had 80% of the garbage been edited out. Diarrhea of the mouth is accurate.

However, the remaining stories in the anthology are pretty good. If you wish to be maximally time efficient and read the truly remarkable stories first;

Child of All Ages by PJ Plauger is a fantastic story of a 2400 year old child immortal and the amazing features she retains as both child and adult. Unfortunately this appears to be the only story written by this brilliant author.

Grotto of the Dancing Deer by Simak is also wonderful, telling of the "discovery" by a mortal that his friend is immortal.

Learning to Be Me by Greg Egan is yet another fantastic story, somewhat more science based with a novel approach to immortality.

Silverberg's "Death Do Us Part" is a haunting immortality tale of a mortal amongst a world of immortals.

If you are interested in immortality short stories, also check out Dann's Immortals book of collected short novels. Stableford also collected a fantastic anthology of immortality stories entitled "Wandering Jew." It's worth the higher cost. You may also wish to purchase Greenberg's "Mutant Files" as Tanya Huff wrote a chilling and outstanding (still not as great as Plauger's Child of All Ages in this book) story of childhood immortality with telepathy in her included story.

At the end of this book Dann and Dozois list additional stories of immortality as well as novels. Hopefully these editors, Greenberg, or others will collect them all to a supersized anthology as the recurring theme of immortality in sci fi is a delight to all!

Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois have assembled eight stories about long-lived people. This is a good book from which to sample the different ways science fiction authors think about this topic. The authors include a list of novels and short stories for readers who long for more.

My two favorites are:

P. J. Plauger's "Child of All Ages" is easily the best in the collection. We meet a little girl who has lived for more than two thousand years. Despite her life experience, everyone treats her like a little girl. This is one of the few short stories that show readers what such arrested development might feel like. Compare this to the situation of Claudia the ten-year-old vampire in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire.

Greg Egan's "Learning to Be Me" explores the implications of implanting a high-tech "jewel" that gradually learns to model everything your brain does. Eventually it can replace your brain and you can live forever. Well, somebody lives forever--but is it you? This is a far more thoughtful examination of the "total backup" of human minds assumed to be unproblematic in hard science fiction works like Iain M. Banks' Surface Detail.

This collection is worth reading through to sample the perspectives on immortality. Too many of the stories seem to make a single point quickly without exploring the theme in sufficient depth. Perhaps this is the nature of the short story--and perhaps that format is simply a poor match for this theme. I recommend exploring its treatment in longer works, such as Poul Anderson's The Boat of A Million Years or Robert Heinlein's Time Enough for Love.