By Ben Brickman
When my editors told me this month's fiction column should have a health and fitness tie-in, I momentarily drew a blank. Then I got to thinking. What is the goal of all these healthy lifestyles? All the bicycling, the exercise machines, the fruit-and-vegetable filled diets? A longer life, of course! And what is the logical limit of this? Humankind's age-old dream: immortality.
So, this month, I present reviews of two short stories that explore different aspects of ultra-long life spans. The stories are by immortal authors (sorry about that) Robert Silverberg and Damon Knight. Both of these stories are available at http://www.fictionwise.com in Palm Doc, Microsoft Reader, and other formats.
The double-platinum wedding anniversary
The first story is Robert Silverberg's "Death Do Us Part," which explores the impact of practical biological immortality on the institution of marriage. In this story, we find that several hundred years from now a set of treatments called "The Process" allows people to rejuvenate their bodies every few decades, keeping them in a state of perpetual youthfulness. They appear about 30 to 35 years old. The story opens with a marriage of an unusual variety: "It was her first, his seventh. She was 32, he was 363: the good old April/September number."
"Her friends couldn't get over it. 'He's ten times your age!' they would exclaim." This kind of witty prose continues throughout the story. We find that the young bride comes into conflict with several of the man's previous wives (some of whom are over 200 years old) and sets of children (some of whom are five times her age), who seem to be trying to break up the marriage. Now, let me point out that in this culture, people don't even pretend that marriages will last forever. Most marriages, we are told, last a few decades,. None last more than seventy or eighty years. It seems the prospect of actually spending all of eternity with a single person is too terrifying for anyone to ponder.
The story is entertaining throughout, showing us other aspects of an ultra-long-life, especially as it pertains to personal relationships. At one point, I almost thought the plot was drifting towards a simplistic ending, but Silverberg dispels that by adding a terrifying twist in the final few pages, which I won't give away here!
Long life, but a what cost?
Damon Knight's story "Masks" was nominated for a Nebula award when it was published in 1968. It explores immortality from an entirely different point of view than the Silverberg story. First, it's not at all humorous. (Not that Damon Knight can't write humor expertly. See "The Big Pat Boom" for proof of that.)
