To Live Forever by Jack Vance
May. 6th, 2025 08:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yukamichiJack Vance's To Live Forever (1956) takes place in a world where life extension technology offers immortality, but in order to forestall problems of overpopulation, it's only made available as a reward to those who have made significant contributions to society. Everyone is guaranteed an average natural lifespan of 82 years; any more involves opting in to a system of meritocractic judgement, with those showing promise being rewarded a step up to the next, increasingly exclusive tier, and twenty more years to work towards immortality. Fall behind and the Assassins are dispatched to retire you (remember, this is voluntary and you've already lived the natural average lifespan and then some).
Enter Gavin Waylock, formerly The Grayven Warlock, a once-immortal who had his eternal life stripped for the crime of murder. The Grayven Warlock disappeared and was presumed dead in an accident while being pursued by the Assassins, and Waylock has spent the last seven years (the statute of limitations for The Grayven Warlock's crime) living incognito, planning to re-enter polite society under the guise of one of his former, unused clones who were set free after his death. But on the eve of his coming out he's recognized, and in a panic he kills his identifier in order to protect his plan. What follows explores Waylock's attempts to regain his lost immortality, while doggedly trying to avoid the pursuit of the woman he killed, who has since been resurrected in the body of one of her clones and is intent on figuring out who killed her and bringing them to justice.
I expected this to be more a slow-burn Machiavellian tale of immortal intrigue and ennui, something like the Chronicles of Amber or those sad vampire stories; in actuality it was more of a dark comedy and a crude, weak social critique, something like a Woody Allen film wedded to a wish.com Kafka. In particular, Waylock's attempts to garner fame working in a sanatorium (which are frequently packed with patients who suffer prolonged catatonia as a result of the stresses of trying to work to gain immortality) was a laugh-fest, punctuated by lucid moments (in the reader i.e. me) where I had to remember that this book was written in the age of ice-pick lobotomies and may very well have been far more critical and far less satirical of psychology than I would like to believe. At one point, one of Waylock's coworkers proposes a method for curing mental illness that I could not help but read as fucking insane. And his continual schemes to both advance himself and outwit his pursuer (who repeatedly uses her social position as one of the immortals to thwart Waylock's plans) are no less entertaining in their bumbling but unexpected success.
Vance hits many of the proper speculative fiction notes, particularly the neologisms: people working towards immortality are "striving" and "on the slope" (presumably referring to some graphical representation of their own social merit and progress towards the next level of life extension) in a manner that is upsettingly prescient of modern day grind/hustle culture. In the end, Waylock succeeds, sort of: he gets re-admitted to the ranks of the immortals through a combination of blackmail and "checkmate, atheists" argumentation, and perhaps more importantly ends up capsizing the whole social order in the process. The book ends on some bizarre, preachy commentary on freedom and individualism; useful, because without it reading the book seventy years later you'd likely think it was a critique of the stifling dead-end reality of capitalism, rather than a critique of the stifling dead-end reality of communism that Vance likely intended it to be.
Enter Gavin Waylock, formerly The Grayven Warlock, a once-immortal who had his eternal life stripped for the crime of murder. The Grayven Warlock disappeared and was presumed dead in an accident while being pursued by the Assassins, and Waylock has spent the last seven years (the statute of limitations for The Grayven Warlock's crime) living incognito, planning to re-enter polite society under the guise of one of his former, unused clones who were set free after his death. But on the eve of his coming out he's recognized, and in a panic he kills his identifier in order to protect his plan. What follows explores Waylock's attempts to regain his lost immortality, while doggedly trying to avoid the pursuit of the woman he killed, who has since been resurrected in the body of one of her clones and is intent on figuring out who killed her and bringing them to justice.
I expected this to be more a slow-burn Machiavellian tale of immortal intrigue and ennui, something like the Chronicles of Amber or those sad vampire stories; in actuality it was more of a dark comedy and a crude, weak social critique, something like a Woody Allen film wedded to a wish.com Kafka. In particular, Waylock's attempts to garner fame working in a sanatorium (which are frequently packed with patients who suffer prolonged catatonia as a result of the stresses of trying to work to gain immortality) was a laugh-fest, punctuated by lucid moments (in the reader i.e. me) where I had to remember that this book was written in the age of ice-pick lobotomies and may very well have been far more critical and far less satirical of psychology than I would like to believe. At one point, one of Waylock's coworkers proposes a method for curing mental illness that I could not help but read as fucking insane. And his continual schemes to both advance himself and outwit his pursuer (who repeatedly uses her social position as one of the immortals to thwart Waylock's plans) are no less entertaining in their bumbling but unexpected success.
Vance hits many of the proper speculative fiction notes, particularly the neologisms: people working towards immortality are "striving" and "on the slope" (presumably referring to some graphical representation of their own social merit and progress towards the next level of life extension) in a manner that is upsettingly prescient of modern day grind/hustle culture. In the end, Waylock succeeds, sort of: he gets re-admitted to the ranks of the immortals through a combination of blackmail and "checkmate, atheists" argumentation, and perhaps more importantly ends up capsizing the whole social order in the process. The book ends on some bizarre, preachy commentary on freedom and individualism; useful, because without it reading the book seventy years later you'd likely think it was a critique of the stifling dead-end reality of capitalism, rather than a critique of the stifling dead-end reality of communism that Vance likely intended it to be.
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