Outnumbering the dead (Legend Novellas) [Hardcover]

Frederik Pohl (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1990 | Series: Legend Novellas

In a future where medical science has all but eliminated death, vid star Rafiel is faced with his own demise and learns many poignant lessons about life as he struggles with this reality. By the author of Our Angry Earth.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The question this novella poses seems like one Robert Silverberg, not Pohl, would come up with: What do you do when you're a mortal in a world of immortals? The genetic treatments that allow most everyone to live forever have failed on Rafiel, an actor, so he faces a maximum life span of only a century or so. Far from making him an outcast, Rafiel's freakish mortality has turned him into a superstar. The immortal legions are fascinated with death, and Rafiel's signs of encroaching age have only increased his entertainment appeal. For 90 years he has enjoyed fame, wealth and the pleasures of affluence--but after his latest rejuvenation treatment, he begins to feel tired. His acting suffers; his fatigue does not go unnoticed by dramaturge Mosay and fellow actor/dancer Docilia; and his long-lost immortal love, Alegrettalike allegretto? ck ,no, it's with one l. Better get used to the crazy spellings in SF reviews. They are a pain!/sss has sent him an unexpected gift. Rafiel comes to resent his immortal acquaintances as he realizes how short a time he has left to live, but with Alegretta's help he may find solace. Hugo and Nebula winner Pohl wrote such classics as Man Plus and Gateway , and the new book shows that he can still work at the top of his form. His writing is spare, the characters' emotions understated, which somehow makes Rafiel all the more sympathetic. This elegant novella stands among Pohl's best work and should not be missed. Illustrations, by Steve Crisp, not seen by PW.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

Illustrated novella set in a medium-future world where immortality is the norm, and lukewarm-fusion technology yields virtually unlimited energy. Rafiel is a song-and-dance superstar with a unique problem: His prebirth immortality treatment failed, and he is doomed to die. Now a rejuvenated young/old man of 90, he begins to feel the first twinges of approaching death. Secretly he is a little angry at his plight, but his fellow performers, sympathetic but uncomprehending, regard death as quaint and rather amusing. His last role will be Oedipus in a modern, rhyming version of Oedipus Rex. As his body begins to fail him, Rafiel thinks more and more of his lost love, Alegretta, once his doctor, now chief fusion engineer aboard Hakluyt, a space habitat soon to head toward Tau Ceti. Unexpectedly, Alegretta visits Rafiel, admitting that previously she couldn't deal with the idea of Rafiel's death; but now she offers him the traditional form of immortality: a child. Rafiel, realizing that his last performance as doomed Oedipus was entirely apt, decides to join Alegretta aboard Hakluyt, where he discovers acceptance and true serenity. Constructed with the precision and perfect movement of a Swiss watch, but, curiously, emotionally flat and unaffecting. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 110 pages
• Publisher: Century; First Edition edition (1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0712636927
• ISBN-13: 978-0712636926
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,342,191 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good read, April 2, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Outnumbering the dead (Legend Novellas) (Hardcover)

A soft scince fiction look at how immortality would affect us. Like any science this one isn't perfect and anomalies crop up. The part that truly captivated me was more how the background characters dealt with being immortal than than how he dealt w/ impending death. To be able to change jobs from doctor to engineer just because you want to. Or to learn the ancient greek dialect that Oedipus was originally written in because you have the time. That gave the story more depth and feeling than what it would've had.

5.0 out of 5 stars On the plus side, there isn't much competition for the good plots in the cemetary, October 31, 2011

By 

Michael Battaglia - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Outnumbering the Dead (Hardcover)

Those of us who aren't very good at sports may have at one point or another in our lives experienced the somewhat humbling phenomena known as "being benched" where we got the remarkably lonely pleasure of having to sit on the sidelines and watch everyone else go about a game that we just weren't allowed to play. Now imagine that you're the only one who has to sit on the sidelines. Now imagine that everyone else is really fascinated by that, to the point where you're more in the game by not being in the game. And then you have to go home anyway and never come back while the game keeps going on without you.

That really clumsy metaphor sort of explains this entire book. In a far future time we come upon poor Rafiel, dancer and all around famous person. Unfortunately, much like the cast of many reality television shows, he's famous for all the wrong reasons. You see, he lives in a society where aging has been more or less conquered and no one really has to die anymore unless they do something really stupid. Disease and infirmities are gone and everyone can live as long as they want as long as they can keep finding reasons to stick around. And there are plenty of reasons to stick around. Unfortunately, there are some infants for whom the immortality procedure doesn't work. Rafiel is one of those people and as he approaches his still relatively healthy nineties, he has to start coming to terms with the fact that his days are actually numbered, and the book deals just as much with the world's reaction to it as it does with his.

Properly, it's not a novel at all, but a novella, and almost a beach read for how fast you'll go through it (I literally read it in an afternoon) especially with a scattering of illustrations to depict some of the society. The lack of length both works for and against it. Given the subject matter, there's probably no real reason to drag this out and extended for too long it would perhaps become a bit maudlin, one man moping about the fact that everyone he knows is going to go on without him, that he's denied all the stuff they're going to get the chance to experience. It's horribly unfair, one of those things you know has to happen to somebody but you'd really prefer it be someone else, and the subject matter alone suggests it's going to hit very close to home for a lot of us. Given a chance for a future where anything is possible, it's the ultimate bad luck. As a consolation everyone feels kind of bad about it, which is something.

I think I expected the book to be more elegiac in tone, the slow decline of someone trying to come to terms with something that nobody can even fathom anymore. Instead, it becomes more about the world that Rafiel lives in and as such almost seems to forget what it's about for a while. The plot seems somewhat secondary to his plans to produce a play based on "Oedipus Rex" and we get pages and pages of scenes devoted to that endeavor before finally getting back on point real late in the story. It becomes almost mundane in spots, the day-to-day of someone on their way out, making plans he might not be around for, saying goodbye to pieces of his life in slow motion. If the book accented those aspects of it more, it would be almost unbearable.

But Pohl seems to focus more on world-building and underplays the emotions involved. Rafiel is sad, indeed, as anyone would be, but he doesn't dwell on it more than necessary. For the most part he goes about life as normal and as such we don't really feel the impending loss of him as great as we should, the withdrawals and the letting go. His relationships seem borne of habit as much as anything else and when an old lover comes back into his life, they get to it and it feels oddly flat. He's waited fifty years for this, in some way, and its hard to grasp why this one is a special one. Which makes the climax of the novel, where he gains a peace of sorts, lacking somewhat in impact. He goes, and is gone, and other people go on without him. It's pitched low enough to be a murmur when all the chords need to come together to produce something shattering to us. It's about the ultimate denial, in a sense. We need more.

And yet. The world itself becomes a fascination. Given a very limited space Pohl makes the most of the canvas, giving us a world of casual magic, where the loss of death has utterly reshaped society. With all the time in the world people do things just for the heck of it. At times it seems to come close to the frivolousness seen in Moorcock's "Dancers at the End of Time", without that series' sense of existential absurdity. In Moorcock's world people can do anything they want and do so to distract themselves from their impending pointless doom. Here Pohl plays it straight. There's plenty of little touches, how someone will just learn dead languages purely because they have the time, or switch careers entirely because they get bored of it. How the most popular plays and shows are the ones where people bite it, because everyone is really fascinated by people dying, since it never happens anymore. It's the tragic elevated to the level of populist entertainment and at the center of it is Rafiel. It's "The Truman Show" with a terminally ill cancer patient as the star. Possessed of the one thing everyone else has lost, he achieves a weird normality. This is his life. This is the end of it.

But the science-fiction often seems to get in the way of the emotions and even in its brief length it can't seem to decide whether it wants to depict a new society or one man's withdrawal from it. It veers more toward the former and beyond the ache of the general concept it becomes hard to feel the story as much as we should. We do, in little moments, but is that enough? It's most honest moments are the ones that touch closest to the places we live, thinking you have so much time when in reality it's barely any at all. Pohl comes near those moments and then seems to shy away at the last second, as if afraid that we're unable to handle it. It gives the story power, but a small power nonetheless. There were times during the story where I wondered what a 1970s era Robert Silverberg would have done with it ("Dying Inside" is probably the closest analogue, although he dealt with mortality in "Book of Skulls"), how much more devastating the book would have been in the hands of someone unparalleled in bringing emotional resonance to unfamiliar future worlds.

This is okay, though, in its small way. Where its focus lies isn't always where we want to look true enough. But does that make us any better than the future world of Rafiel, where everyone is watching intently for him to take his last breath, secretly glad it's not them? Playing his death as small even in its uniqueness may be the truest thing about the tale, for what is our death other than a minor and unremarkable event to those who barely know us and a much bigger deal to those who are close and most of all, maybe, of course, ourselves.

2.0 out of 5 stars The dark, sad story of an unsympathetic character, June 9, 2010

By 

Dave Deubler (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Outnumbering the Dead (Hardcover)

On the Earth of the future, Rafiel is a performer/actor/dancer who is dying in a world where everyone else expects to live forever. The intensive medical treatments that indefinitely postpone death did not work for him, so he has had to live his life knowing that he has little more than a century to live, while his fellows feel free to devote decades to a mere passing fancy. Reproduction is an oddity, since there's neither need nor room for population growth, so the only chance for genuine meaning in this seeming idyll lies in leaving Earth for the distant stars. Given this backdrop, Rafiel gets the opportunity to give the greatest performance of his career, as Oedipus Rex, a man whom the gods had granted endless good fortune only so that his fall might be more dramatic. The parallel with Rafiel is all-too obvious. Can Rafiel find a way to cheat his own fate?

This is a very short novel, but it felt like it should have been shorter yet. The first half of the book was painfully slow, setting up the main character in his milieu. The second half wasn't as bad - at least things started to happen - but there really wasn't much of a payoff. Ultimately, the characters weren't all that engaging; despite his plight, the protagonist is more annoying than endearing, and the supporting characters are even worse. Only Rafiel's lost love is portrayed in anything like a sympathetic light and she doesn't get many lines until the book's almost over. This story might have offered an interesting take on what the entertainment industry would be like in the distant future, but Pohl's attempts in this direction are uninspired and weak. It's hard to say who this book was intended for, but by the time the book gets around to looking at some real science, sci-fi fans will have lost interest. A dark, sad short story that overstays its welcome.