Who Wants To Live Forever?

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I sympathize with people who want to live forever.  Truly, I do. I have all these ideas and more importantly so many things I want to learn and do. Right now I want to learn poser, for instance, not so much for the animation (were there time and life enough, I’d want to do that too.  In fact if I were a kid right now I’d be looking at how to make animated movies on my own or with one or two friends) but for the character creation/drawing/background.  It would be easier, frankly, to do my own covers, but also if I got good enough you could put some of it for sale on dreamstime – another stream of income.

But the question is – if you lived forever, would you really?

Bear with me.

Recently I started putting the Musketeers’ Mysteries up.  I now have the first three, Death of A Musketeer, The Musketeer’s Seamstress and The Musketeer’s Apprentice.  These were books on which I thought I’d have to do minimal work before I put them up.  At first I had this vague, hopeful idea of doing a document compare between the published version and mine, and making some choices, and voila, edited manuscript.

It doesn’t work that way.  For one, assuming that the edits were sane or rational would be truly unwise.  I’ve been finding that changes were done after page proofs (this part I actually knew since the Shakespeare books, where I happened to read a passage in the middle and hit the ceiling, as someone had changed it to their idea of Shakespearean English, but it was actually illiterate English.)  A lot of them were done by someone who ran spell checker and ran merrily ahead with no idea of what difference archaic English has from modern one.  A lot of word-salad sentences.

For this reason, I went painstakingly line by line on Seamstress where I found a “brilliant” thing, where someone had changed Armand Jean Du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu’s birth name to Armand Jean de Richelieu – clearly not understanding titles, and also failing to get that the title was not bestowed on him till he was a Cardinal and the king’s counselor.  (And this referred to his young misadventures.)  I have no idea when that was changed.  Might very well have been before page proofs.  The two years in which this series was being written was the time at which my younger son was having issues in school, and then when I was homeschooling him.  THAT was rather the focus of my attention, and though I worked very hard at the writing (I have a map of Paris at the time that I bought from a war gaming site.  It’s right now behind a bookcase, but it will come out and onto the wall again when I’m writing the next one) and I ordered books from France for the things not covered here – but when you’re doing three of these a year, when the page proofs come back you might not have an enormous amount of time, and you assume(d) that while they might not be improving your prose, they’d leave your details alone.

You’d be wrong.

A similar detail got flagged in a review of The Musketeer’s Apprentice – and it was the same exact issue, only in this case I was fairly sure (still am fairly sure – it’s had to be absolutely sure as I can’t remember which of the ten versions on the drive was the one I sent in – I was naming them things like final, really final, truly, truly final.  Yeah, I need a system) that in the manuscript turned in there had been an explanation of the name, and a quip on it.  It’s in eight of the versions on my drive.  Did I delete it in one of the passes, thinking it sounded clunky and meaning to type something else, and then it never got re-written?  Wouldn’t be the first time.  Of course, as it stands it’s an insane error – and you’d think that the publishing house would catch it, right?  Guys, I’m not even sure that the underpaid flunky who went over it (the same bright flare who wanted me to say something about Porthos remembering “subconsciously”) didn’t remove it because it was clunky or because she had seen a movie which made that mistake.

The problem with that was that I didn’t go over Musketeer’s Apprentice as I went over Musketeer’s Seamstress – the thing would almost likely have hit me in the face – and that the version I sent to the people doing it for me was one of those without the explanation.  So the first version I uploaded still had the mistake.  (Yes, I’ve uploaded a new one.)

The other bad review made more sense, and is more to the point here – I gave absolutely ludicrous names to the walk-on characters, even if they walked on in two books.  Why?  I have no clue.  I have a very vague idea about its amusing me, but I have no idea WHY.  I think honestly, if you were to dissect it deep down by that time I was so deeply resentful of the publisher that it was a joke on them.  The same way I set the refinishing mysteries in Goldport because I knew they wouldn’t catch it.

But didn’t I think of my readers?  Well, not really.  Partly because this was the time when I had six books out and none made it to shelves.  Partly because I thought the readers would “get” it.  (In which I was not only wrong, but I can’t imagine what I was thinking.)

I’d changed that in the first two books, as I did the line by line, but not in the third because one of the ridiculous names was necessary for my denouement.  I figured it out, and did that, and reuploaded the book.

The problem now, though, is that I can’t POSSIBLY trust myself then.  It’s not just that the books were very badly edited.  The thing with the joke names shook me from the beginning, but it’s not just that.  Going through the first two – there are choices…

I don’t know how to explain this.  It’s not even word choices, though it’s that too – it’s a thousand little different choices in how you tell a story.  In terms of movies, it’s what you light and what you obscure. There are a thousand different choices that read as though they were made not so much by a clueless newby, but by someone completely different.

Now, I’m aware – none better – that you can’t just go back and rewrite everything you ever wrote.  Writers of the past didn’t, heaven knows.  And a few of my very favorite authors have a strong inflection in the middle of their careers, where the stuff before is pretty standard, even if touched with genius, and the stuff after is uniquely theirs.  But writers of the past weren’t faced with bringing out indie editions of their work, either, where you’re more uniquely responsible for it.

That said, two caution points.  A) the musketeer mysteries have their fans, and I still get requests for number six, which means as annoying as they are to me now, they can’t be that bad B) I wrote them after ten years of reading a lot of historical mystery, which in the last ten years hasn’t happened at all, or at least not deep-historical (coming from where I do, 100 years is not history, merely old news.)

So of course I’m not going to go back and rewrite the whole things, but I am, before I bring them out in print (I have a proof for DOAM in my hot little hands, but I won’t put it up until I have time to go over it step by step. Also, I had an attack of random capitalization, among other places in the blurb.) I’m going to go line by line and do my best to fix the most outrageous instances of “this isn’t me any longer.”

So, besides the fact that – I am that neurotic – I spent two days considering giving up the whole writing thing, because you can bet I’m making mistakes today that will make me cringe in ten years, it made me feel awfully queasy on “who wrote these books?”

It might seem like I’m being stupid – but it’s not that obvious from the inside.  Look, I know my own hand – any craftsman does.  In the decisions you make, I know how my hand turns, as it were.  I know my fingerprints in the clay.

But these books, written only – I think – seven or eight years ago, feel alien.  As though someone else entirely wrote them.  They feel not-me.

Was I not me seven years ago?  How do I know?  Do you?  Some of my older stuff might as well have been written by an alien, but this one shook me, because it’s still close enough and because I was already a seasoned pro.  Who is that woman who wrote those books? And what happened to her?

As we live longer lives who lives that lives?  What is the continuity in the human mind and heart?

 Charlie Martin and I were talking about how over the last fifty years life expectancy essentially doubled.  And yes, I know people will come in and say “if you survived childhood” – bullsh*t.  Lies, damn lies and statistics.  Yes, there were probably always people who lived till eighty in any population, and there would be the marked outlier who lived to 100.  But what people expected to live, what was considered old – all that has moved.

I remember being a little girl and hearing of someone dying at sixty and everyone shaking their heads and going “well, he was old.  It was his time.”

Shakespeare died at 58 and he was a very old man.

My son who volunteers at the hospital says barring accident MOST – like 80% — of the people who come in in really bad shape are in their hundreds. 

We’re living longer.  We’re living healthier.  When I was ten, I met someone who was 80, which seemed like an impossible age, and he looked/acted like the 100 year olds today.  My dad is 83 and is not a human wreck.

Are all of us going to live that long?  There are no guarantees of course.  Pie in the sky, they might invent rejuv and we might all live 200 years.

BUT the question is – who will live that long?

I’m forever stunned with both the continuity and the changes, and how they’re not what you expect, or anyone would.  A friend I hadn’t talked to in decades, but who is one of the few people who knew me growing up, wasn’t even vaguely surprised by my turn to the libertarian end of politics “Yes, but you were always like that.  You just didn’t have a name for it.”

Another friend, possibly my oldest friend, when I was raging at being stuck in a “literary” niche several years ago said “That would drive you nuts.  You never wanted to do weighty and worthy things. You wanted to write pulp.”  And that was accurate, but I didn’t remember wanting it.

In some ways, as I get older, I seem to become more and more myself.

But then there is going back and looking at things I wrote and going “who IS this stranger?”  It’s entirely possible, of course, that the stranger was the result of my having hit my head around that time (I understand severe concussion can take five years to fully recover from) and also of my being under intense emotional pressure, both because of what the school was doing to my son, and because of my situation in publishing itself, which often resembled running to stay in place.

But frankly, it feels more that, as a writer, I was a different person.

So, when I think I’d love to live forever – or at least till 200 – and learn and do and write, I wonder who that would be.

Perhaps we, each of us, die a little every day.  They say we change all our body cells in seven years (?)  Perhaps we change all our personality in seven years, little by little, by accretion, like the sea taking and depositing material, till in the end we’re someone completely different and our younger selves are dead and gone.

No matter how long we live.

 

217 thoughts on “Who Wants To Live Forever?”

  1. No, I’d say we discover ourselves more and more as time goes on. Like you, I often struggled with things that I couldn’t put a name to. And now that I know what they are, I can do them with greater confidence. I wonder what understanding I’d have at 200. Or 500.

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    1. Noninterference, by Harry Turtledove. You can read the first half of it here thanks to Baen’s habit of putting up sample chapters. The part I’m going to talk about happens in the first three chapters, so go ahead and read those now; I’ll wait.

      No, really, I’ll wait.

      Okay, now that we’re on the same page: with just a few hundred, a mere thousand and a half, years of observing human nature, this woman has become impossible to lie to. Imagine what kind of athletic skill someone could achieve with five hundred years of martial arts practice. Or what depth of understanding of music you could achieve with a thousand years of work. Really, it boggles the mind.

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  2. Of course, there’s the difference between “living forever” and “forever young”. [Wink]

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      1. Point, but I was thinking of the character in Greek mythology who was given immortality but continued to physically age. [Image of a thousand year old man who looks it.]

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            1. I used to be a Torchwood fan until it jumped the shark in Miracle Day. I don’t want to see or hear about John Barrowman ever again.

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  3. Eh, by the time I finished asking questions about what this living forever entailed, the fact that it was about living forever would be kind of moot by the end.

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  5. We already see some behavioral changes, as women have fewer children and have them at an older age.

    An interesting “what if” would be, what if human lifespan doubled (140-160 years), but fertility remained the same? If a woman’s fertile years were still 15-40, but she was still facing 100 years of life after that?

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      1. Yup. And it’s not just women affected. Currently even if a man can father children well into his elder years the physical requirements of raising that child make it less appealing after about 35-40. In a hypothetical world where a man is healthy and active well into his hundreds, is he really going to stay with an infertile woman for 60-70 years or more? Or will he instead find a younger wife and start another family? What happens to his first wife? And what happens to young men who now have to compete against men who’ve had 50-80 years of work in order to establish themselves? Do you end up with an underclass of young men who know that they’ll have to work 50 years in order to even have a chance to find a wife? Do they hook up with older, infertile women? The dynamics offer so many juicy possibilities.

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            1. If you really want to annoy people: Have a society where the men are outnumbered 90%-10%; yet the men are in charge because “every farmer knows: It doesn’t matter how many hens are in the coop — the problems start when there’s more than one rooster”…. >:)

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        2. A bit off topic, but that brings to mind this guy

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvo_Ylpp%C3%B6

          He was my doctor until my early teens. He fathered his youngest child when he was about 70 and his second wife about 40. So she had been born when he was already about thirty. Tiny man, I remember him as just barely taller than I was when I last saw him, and I’m short even now as an adult, but one with a stellar career and who moved in the high society of his time. Lived to 104.

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          1. Okay, I had to reread that, the first time I read it as he fathered his second wife at about 40.

            I know at least two guys who fathered children in their sixties, one with a second wife and one with a ‘I don’t know how many it was’ wife. Also it used to be much more common for older men to marry much younger women (young enough to have been their children, ie 15-25 years younger) than it is today).

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            1. Can’t remember the story, but apparently there’s some guy in the US (Congressman?) who’s family has a history of the males being fathers at advanced age….his grandfather was, IIRC, 97 when he had a son, and that son was in his mid- to late-90’s when this guy was born. Boggles the mind, it does.

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              2. America’s 10th president, John Tyler … well, see below:

                Pres. John Tyler’s Grandchildren Are Still Alive
                First Posted: 01/25/2012 7:54 pm Updated: 01/26/2012 10:22 am
                Try to do the math on this: John Tyler, born in 1790, became the 10th president of the United States, taking office in 1841 after the death of William Henry Harrison. And two of his grandchildren are still alive!

                Of course, not much from Tyler’s time is still around. In the year of his birth, President George Washington gave the first State of the Union address and Thomas Jefferson served as his secretary of state.

                In Europe, a young upstart 2nd lieutenant named Napoleon Bonaparte was making a name for himself in the French Revolution.

                And in the realm of technological innovation, one of the most successful innovators of that age, Harvey Kennedy, invented the shoelace.

                In Tyler’s life between 1790 and 1862, he fathered 15 children, and two of his grandsons are still living, reports mentalfloss.com.

                With 15 children under his belt, Tyler became the most prolific American president, according to his genealogy.

                Apparently, one of Tyler’s children, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, born in 1853, fathered Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. in 1924 as well as Harrison Ruffin Tyler in 1928, as reported by sherwoodforest.org.

                Tyler was also the first president to wed while he was in office.

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                1. Well, my family is not quite that extreme in the short term, but still, going back to my g-g-g-grandfather (born in 1761), there’s an average of 41 years between generations.

                  Heck, my grandfather started his family at the age of 40. Although I have wondered if there is another family out there that we don’t know about, from before then. Or maybe just by-blows. I mean, how would a man who got his wife pregnant 12 times in 23 years keep it in his pants to the age of 40?

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                2. That’s it! Thanks for posting that, I meant to look it up when I got home last night, but spent the evening getting ready for a job interview this morning. I know, I know…I really need to get my priorities straight! :)

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          2. Which is where you get the “unborn widow” clause in the rule against perpetuities.

            The rule is that a clause is not valid if there is some conceivable case where it would result in an interest vesting more than 21 years after the death of a person currently alive. One court threw out a legal malpractice suit on the grounds that the rule against perpetuities was so ugly that no one could get it right. At least this case is actually possible.

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    2. I’m working on a story where that problem caused the people devising immortality to include a means that puts your reproductive system in abeyance until you are ready. Which had evolutionary effects of its own. (On top of a side effect that it also decreased the sex drive — this is a world where everyone wants kids because after a few hundred generations of this, evolution worked.)

      The life span is a theoretical 7000 years. The overwhelming majority of people die in their first few centuries in accident, having had their kids as soon as they could switch the system on. However, people who put it off find that this prolongs fertility; people who have kids in their thousands may have more than a hundred. (Note that men also have fertility problems as they age, particularly with mutations.)

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    3. Seems to me that would solve the problem of women having it all. Get married around 18-20, have kids, then go to college and start your career for the next 60 or so years. A lot of the specifics would depend on the exact nature of the longevity.

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      1. That might also require the custom of parents at least partially supporting their kids while they have their grandchildren. Or maybe great grandparents giving money to grandchildren while great grandchildren are small. Pretty often the reason given for waiting to have children is that people want to be able to offer them all kinds of things and need money for that, so they need to get a good job with good pay first before they dare to become parents, but if the older generations were around and now in their best earning phase and the parents could count on at least some money coming from some of them it might become easier to take the risk of having kids while young.

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        1. Customs would evolve. For the simple reason that women who put it off would not be the ones whose genes and cultural patterns appear in the next generation.

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  6. I do– unfortunately I will probably the statistical anomaly in my family line. 80s is young, 90s is the normal death rate and 100s is the age we strive to attain. We do have long lived genes. The curse is one in a generation dies too young. We may have two this generation (my cousin had lymphoma in his 30s… still going though).

    That is not the point though– even in spiritual systems you are expected to grow and change every seven to ten years. We know that we are growing when we become more ourselves. It is why Alzheimers is a tragic disease because these folks become less of themselves.

    That isn’t the point either– I was looking at some of my older work recently (getting rid of the ever-growing paper stacks) and I actually read one of my first stories. I was– amused? appalled? It was like reading something from a elementary school compared to what I am writing today. Even my poetry has changed. I don’t have what I wrote at nine and ten, but I do have some that I wrote at 20 and 21. It is all about “someday my prince will come” or “I will never have a prince.” It wasn’t until I was in my 30s that my poetry actually started to have texture and meaning. So yea, we change, but it also has to do with our ages and what is important at that age.

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    1. Gee, some are content that you grow over seven to ten years?

      Growth is the only evidence of life. — John Henry Newman

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  7. When I come across old class notes I get the “wrong dimension” feeling. They are in my distinctive handwriting, but the young me had so much already stored I just had to mention key bits (for the del-cross conversion to angular vs. cartesian coordinates) to remember the whole thing. Obviously my memory cache has shrunk and I need to upload more into RAM to even get through the day! I need an external brainy-thingy…

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  8. There are a thousand different choices that read as though they were made not so much by a clueless newby, but by someone completely different.

    Dearie, I do that with blog comments, sometimes as little as 3 months old. Even though I can always recognize my own voice when I’m not trying to be punny, my approach to a problem varies like the spring wind.

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    1. I reread my dissertation after writing a second 80k+ word book and wondered who in their right minds let that piece of, ahem, verbiage get past the committee. At the moment I’m retooling some older (as in written several years ago) stories to better fit the canon and ouch! I’m glad no one’s seen these yet.

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  9. On rejuv: How will you know when it’s working?

    Tangent: A long-time friend who — to the best of my knowledge — has no clue about my fiction writing, when told about The High T Shebang, said, “Oh, yeah. I know science fantasy is your thing.” Really? I think we put out more and better signals as to who we are than we realize. And those who stand apart and see us from that perspective sometimes see better than we can ourselves. You know, “The eye cannot see itself.”

    OK. Not so tangential.

    M

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  10. I would still like to live forever, or die trying. Maybe I’m naive, but life seems to get better, and I feel morre stable as I age (mentally,not necessarily physically.) It took Woodrow Wilson Smith hundreds of years to get bored, and his family gave him a new outlet for his wonder. (Irealize it is SF, but still.)
    Also Char and I had our kids very early, and have already had 30 years after having children, and enjoy being active enough to enjoy time together after kids are raised.
    Just because the world is run by the terminally stupid and selfish right now is not a reason to despair.

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  12. I do not want to live forever, not in this physical form. I failed to keep up with the scheduled maintenance and operation requirements when I was younger, and now the warranty’s been voided and I’m facing some pretty expensive repairs to the rear suspension and joints. And I know that at some point in the not-too-distant future I’m going to start developing surface rust that will have to be removed on a regular basis, and have a better than average likelihood of having related internal corrosion. Four score years will be plenty for me, thanks.

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      1. Still probably not. My heart’s not big enough to be able to love and then lose people over and over and over.

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        1. That might be the worst part about living forever, or just living very long. How long could you keep somebody? Accidents happen, people do change and at times change enough that they can no longer relate to each other. So how long would marriages last, how long would your children or your parents or siblings, not to mention friends, stay in touch with you even if they lived? Would you be meeting somebody after a few hundred years and no longer remember who she had been, your younger sister or your niece or your own daughter, and if daughter from which marriage? Or worse, you’d remember her but she would no longer remember you.

          I’d hate that. Double or triple or four times our current lifespans, and things might not yet become that bad, but the longer the lives would be the worse that problem would probably become.

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        2. I declared our last family cat as the last because I could do the math: I took my age, added a cat’s likely lifespan and realized I would not, at that age, have the heart to do right by the beast.

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        3. I would submit that the way you feel about love and loss is a product of the bright shining moment in human history we’re living in. For most of that history, the idea that you could go the majority of your adult life without experiencing significant personal loss, in the form of dead children, spouses, family members, and friends would be in the realm of wild fantasy.

          The real aberration, I’m afraid, is our amazing lack of familiarity with death. We have internalized some very unrealistic expectations, in that the majority of our kids see adulthood, and the majority of us die in comfortable old age. The casualty rates of the past are something most of us cannot comprehend, because it is now that alien to us.

          Were you to live in another age, you’d be inured to death. It would be a comfortable friend, and an expected guest. Likewise, were you immortal, you’d adapt as well as anyone living in the 19th Century did, which is pretty much the last era of massive human loss in early life our culture experienced.

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          1. You’re laboring under a misconception. I am quite familiar with death. I lost my paternal grandmother when I was 6. I came incredibly close to losing my mother when I was 5 and she die when I was 16. I have lost my father as well. I have lost all my aunts and uncles who were of my father’s generation. I have lost two cousins to cancer, one when he was 12 and the other when she was in her late 40’s. A third cousin died of a heart attack when he was 30. I wasn’t there but paid a shiva call on his wife and children.

            I have sat shiva for both my parents including graveside services. Since I am the youngest of my siblings, was the one who was living at home when my father had his fatal heart attack. I called 911 and I heard my father have his 2d and fatal heart attack when the ambulance we were all in pulled to the side of the road. He lost consciousness and died two days later.

            Don’t assume that everyone fits a statement you are making.

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            1. Emily, you’re the anomaly, I’m afraid. I was addressing TXRed, anyway.

              You should conduct a short survey, of your neighbors. I have known more than a few people who’ve never, ever known anyone personally who has died. That sounds absurd, but it’s true–They were born after their grandparents had already passed, never knowing them, and everyone of their acquaintance was either of their generation or near it.

              I first ran into this with the the wife of one of my troops. We were tasked with running a funeral detail for a long-retired veteran, and the actual funeral service was being held at the post chapel. She came by to watch what we were doing, and while talking to her during a break, that little tidbit came out. She’d also never, ever seen anything killed, which I found mind-boggling as well, having grown up on a farm.

              It’s a statistical truth, I’m afraid: Modern America and a lot of Europe is just not that familiar with death. There’s a study out there that I remember reading that discussed this issue, and the conclusion was that one of the likely reasons for our aversion to such things stems from an utter lack of familiarity with it. Once upon a time, it was very common for someone to die in their homes, surrounded by family. Today, we instead farm these things out to old-age homes and hospices, and it’s very uncommon for someone to die surrounded by family. Death is sufficiently uncommon that the mere fact that someone has died in a home is often enough to affect the value of it. Real estate guy I talked to tells me that if a recent occupant died in the home, he counts on having to knock off a significant amount of money.

              You may have the experience of death, but your fellow citizens are increasingly unfamiliar with it.

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              1. And this unfamiliarity is why Western Society is failing in the face of societies who stare the Reaper in the face every fucking day. I’d love to see what would happen to a bunch of kids who were exposed to the reality of life at age 2 or so.

                “‘A million little Eichmanns’, Prof? Wait’ll you get a load of a million little *MES*. Of course, you won’t have long to enjoy the experience….”

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              2. This is one of the reasons why America is going mad.

                it’s been tested in the lab even. If you take people into the lab and give some an exercise to reflect on their mortality, and then test them, you find they are much more conservative compared to a control group.

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            2. You may be familiar with death, but most all of those examples you cited are of people older than yourself. I’ve watched people die myself, but I have never held a dead child in my arms; how many people could say that a hundred and fifty years ago? Most people these days live into old age, at least in America, even third world countries have a much better rate of survival until aging factors into death than has been true throughout most history.

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              1. I’ve never watched anyone die, but … how do I put this? I grew up knowing two thirds of my generation had succumbed to what was likely small pox (or unusually virulent chicken pox. Most of my pox-marks are on my stomach where it was most clustered, but those of you who get to meet me might notice a scar on the side of my mouth — the only one to grow on my face). I was somewhere between two and three. I also by the age of 30 had lost two of the 12 classmates who went through elementary school in the village with me. No, I didn’t see them die. I was in the states. It still affects you.

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                1. my class in High School was one of the few to make it through the 4 years without anyone in it passing away somehow. Came close … one guy had a head on on dirt bikes but the other kid died. And another was hit by a drunk but got lucky, but they cut him from the cab of his Luv.

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                  1. Oh, yeah. Ninth grade exams, one of the students jumped from the center of the well between stair cases. She was in the OTHER gifted form. I didn’t know her personally, and I didn’t see it. We were out for lunch — my friends and I — and came back to the school closed and were told it had happened. Another threw herself under a train. Again, no one I’d known.

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                    1. We had a kid who died in elementary school from cystic fibrosis, and another in high school, from leukemia.

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                    2. The class ahead it was a boating accident, and the class behind followed our example (I think we were the first to not have a death, actually) but it was my sister who got lucky when she was hit by a car and dragged 150 feet. She spend 30 days in ICU, 39 total in the hospital. I tried to give the folks a heart attack the next year by running into the side of a car on my motorbike abut only broke my leg. My helmet did have a nice streak of blue paint on it though.

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                    3. All of this is different, however, from the Death as Constant Companion experience which most of the world has known. Talking to people just a little older than I am, say … the leading edge of the Boom and I find that through most of their childhoods Death (or living death) from polio and other childhood disease was a constant presence in their lives. So much so that when there was an outbreak (or concern that there might be) swimming pools and movie theatres stayed empty at the height of summer as people stayed home (without AC) to avoid the risk of exposure.

                      This kind of moderation of behaviour to contain risk is, I think, what Kirk was driving at. In America it has been mostly absent with the exception of a few light outbreaks — AIDS in the Eighties, MERSA a few years ago. We are enjoying a brief (and temporary) advantage in our war against Microbia and ought appreciate it for what it is.

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                    4. indeed.
                      People talk about living elsewhere and in other times, and I really cannot think of anywhere, or anywhen I want to do more than maybe visit. Maybe the Future. Maybe.

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                    5. When I was a cadet (1964), we had a member of our squadron commit suicide by leaping from the fourth floor terrazzo. He was three people behind me. Needless to say, the next few days were pretty rough for all of us.

                      We had one person die while we were in high school — one of the few guys I didn’t know. He’d just transferred from another school. He was killed in a three-car accident one evening when it was so foggy no one should have been on the road.

                      I can identify with the smallpox/chicken pox scar. I had smallpox (a very mild case) when I was a year old. I still have a few scars, including two on my face. The Air Force never accepted that I’d had the disease, and kept giving me smallpox vaccinations that did NOTHING. Literally, the only way I could stop getting the vaccinations was to retire!

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                    6. When they were talking about smallpox and terrorism, my mother was trying to remember whether I had gotten it. she knew my older sister had and my younger hadn’t, but me, she dithered. and dithered.

                      Until one day I came out, showed her a scar on my shoulder, and said, “That’s the smallpox vaccination scar, isn’t it?”

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          2. Kirk, I’m aware that I live in a very strange time, and that I’ve been amazingly blessed. I used to work with paramedics, I’ve had class mates and relatives die, and the Reaper and I’ve exchanged nods once or twice. But as I said above, I am blessed (cursed?) to form very few but very strong attachments. I’m not certain, even in a world where death normally strikes near and often, that I’d be willing to go through that for more than my “average” lifespan. (Which, in that world, would probably have already passed because I’d have been married and likely died of post-partum hemmorage, but that’s neither here nor there.) *shrug*

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        4. I am reminded of one the most poignant moments I remember seeing on television:
          “You can spend the rest of your life with me, [Rose,] but I can’t spend the rest of mine with you. I have to live on.”

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    2. “If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”
      Mickey Mantle, age 64, American baseball great whose father and uncles died in their forties and who never expected to outlive them.

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    3. I’m older than a handful of the people here, and as TXRed so aptly put it, “voided the warranty” by the time I was 12. I’m currently 67, working on raising my fourth child, and building my third career. My wife and I have been married for 47 years, and still find each other exciting to be around. The body is shot, the engine sputters and misses now and then, and the control circuits misfire. Depending on Obamacare and military medicine, I may have anywhere from five to as much as 30 more years ahead of me. That said, would I go back to being 30, or even 20? Physically, maybe, but only if I could keep my current memories. I would be more likely to accept if my friends also had the same option. I’ve already lost more than twenty of my high school classmates (out of 130), and expect to lose one or two a year until it’s my turn. I can’t even begin to count how many military friends I’ve lost. Some of those died at ages younger than I was at the same time, sometimes ten years younger than I was at that time.

      I’m not that far from the “three score and ten” we’ve been promised. A few more years tacked onto that wouldn’t bother me. The only way I would accept adding decades onto what I currently have would depend on a lot of other problems being taken care of first.

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      1. Yeah, it’d be great to be that 19 year old body with today’s mind ….well, maybe the mind of a few years back . . . My current one seems prone to forget things. My 35 year old eyes would be nice to have as well.

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  13. Perspectives Change. Experiences matter. Ten years is a long time in the life of a human being. Think about it Sarah. Even if you live to be 100, that’s ten percent of your life since you wrote these things. Personally, I’d be more worried if there WASN’T some kind of change in you over that time. Think about it.

    Ten years ago, I was in love with a wonderful woman that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I had wonderful visions of being a husband and (eventually) a father and how grand life was going to be. It was going to be great.

    Ten years later, I’m divorced for that same DAMNED woman and feeling guilty because I now have three kids that don’t get to see their father every day like I did when I was growing up. Four years ago I took a creative writing class. The prof commented on the strong element of family in general, and father and son in particular, evident in all of my writing. That was before the divorce. My current WIP is of a loner raised in a creche. I’m not sure I could have conceived of the idea four years ago. That much has changed for me that quickly. My outlook is actually a lot harsher than it was four years ago too.

    If you’re worried about mistakes in the writing, just fix what you can and move on, but it sounds more like you’re worried about the changes in your mindset. You’ve moved across an ocean to a country that is not like the one you grew up in. The longer you’re here the more that will change you. Your sons are older now. I find myself wondering how many of those funny names were chosen due to recent exposure to childrens literature. You’re not reading that now. Your kids are older and they probably do most of their reading on their own now. It sounds like you’re going through what every other human being does. You can’t step in the same river twice and you can’t write the same book twice either. Sometimes, I wish I could.

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  14. I would like to live forever. I would prefer not to live forever in my sins.

    Every now and then I go back and read something I wrote a while ago and wonder how I ever got the inspiration to write something so trenchant. Then again, I have some old diaries I have earmarked as emergency fuel reserve. It’s kind of interesting to see how I’ve had really smart days and really stupid days.

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    1. Lawrence Watt-Evans had a novel in his Ethshar series (With A Single Spell, if memory serves) which included a character who had achieved immortality, forever unaging, forever a 16-year old girl. While it isn’t exactly a horror story …

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      1. I remember three variations on that idea.

        One story involved a girl who somebody tested an immortality potion on. She lived and he didn’t but she wasn’t even a teenager and had remained the same age physically over the centuries.

        The second story involved a “boy” who aged extremely slowly. It takes him decades to grow the same amount that a normal person would grow in a year.

        The third story involved a “boy” who was always a preteen physically but had the power of a minor god.

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        1. Heh. I can neither confirm nor deny that there may or may not be something in the works (okay, its mostly in my braincell) regarding a very small fraction of the population (maybe two dozen or so currently in the US…haven’t decided on that part yet) that ages extremely slowly (dog-years, or even slower), and have abnormal “abilities”; they’re trained up and used in the war between angels and demons waged on earth. Earth is the DMZ, neither angels nor demons will directly set foot here, but the use of proxies is not prohibited.

          I always worried about not coming up with “original” story ideas, until Larry Correia wrote a post about ripping off ideas.

          And in case my html doesn’t work:
          http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2013/04/29/ask-correia-13-ripping-off-ideas/

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        2. By eight aren”t most “normal” eight year old girls into branded merchandise, e.g. Hello Kitty? Wall-to-wall Justin Bieber … the same song repeating on the PA?

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  16. People don’t age at the same rates. Not sure why. In some cases it’s fairly clear. Drug use will age you–look at Robert Downey Jr. I had a professor in grad school who died of a stroke. He was a heavy drinker, smoker, and as a field geographer spent a lot of time in the sun. I made some remark about his age, thinking he must have been near retirement and was told that he was 46! I know I’m coming up on “retirement age”, but fortunately I’m still physically in good shape. When I see people who clearly are old and looking feeble, I think how old are they? And when will I be like that?

    I know this group is all familiar with Heinlein and Lazarus Long, but I highly recommend a little movie by Jerome Bixby (actually done posthumously) called The Man from Earth http://www.amazon.com/Jerome-Bixbys-The-Man-Earth/dp/B000UYX4Q8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1385489007&sr=8-1&keywords=the+man+from+earth. Not the be-all/end-all of the discussion, but certainly an interesting exploration on living forever.

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    1. Drug use changes some people differently than others also. I used to be around a lot of tweakers where I grew up and never believed the line you used to hear about crank aging you ten years for every year of chronic use, because I knew people who had been using it for ten, fifteen, even twenty years and looked their age or close to it. But then I knew this decrepit old biker called the Spin Doctor (for obvious reasons) who was feeble, white-haired, wrinkled, hunched up and arthritic, looked to be at least in his eighties. One day I was talking to a woman I knew in her early thirties, and she told me she graduated high school with him… that was an eye opener.

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    2. It’s not just drugs that will do it, either.

      I used to work for a guy, whose name I shall not use, who looked to be in his early sixties. He was still hanging with the young guys, running our platoon. He could out-run, out-party, and probably out-fornicate even the guys in their late teens. Literally. We’d work a full day, and then he’d be “Let’s go hit the NCO club…”, drag us out there, and we’d be heading back to get some sleep by nine, while he’d stay there until two-three in the morning. At five am, he’d be back in the barracks, banging on doors, bright and chipper. We’d all be wondering if he had some kind of pact with the Devil, he was that annoying.

      In any event, the discussion started one afternoon about his age. We’re all sitting around, discussing it, unaware that he’s in the next room. A consensus was reached that he was in his early sixties. Hearing us, he came in, talked a bunch of trash, and before we knew it, there was a betting pool going where if someone guessed his actual age, they won the pool. If we managed a guess that came within five years of his actual age, the pooled money would go towards a platoon party. If nobody came close, he won it all.

      So, we all put our money in. All told, the pot wound up around twelve-thirteen hundred dollars. Nobody, and I mean nobody put money on anything under age 55. And, a couple of guys had put in a bunch of money, like to the tune of hundreds.

      Whole idea was ‘effin stupid, to be honest, because I could have walked over two buildings to my buddy the training NCO and had his birthdate for free, within minutes. I should have, too, but we were that sure of how old he had to be.

      When the whole thing was done, we went and told him, and he came over and looked at the pool numbers we had up on the board, and about to blew a gasket laughing. When he quit, he pulled out his ID card, and showed us his birthdate. We all nearly had heart attacks.

      He was 38.

      You have to understand: He looked, and I do mean looked, like he was in his sixties. Wrinkles, grey wispy hair, bad teeth, the works. He wasn’t. We actually made him bring in his birth certificate before we’d believe him, and after we saw that, we were all going “Damn…”. Following weeks and months saw a bunch of young guys looking death in the face, and going “Y’know… Maybe this burning the candle at both ends ain’t such a good idea, after all… Let me go get a solid eight hours, tonight…”.

      For what it’s worth, the subject of this story kept right on burning both ends, the middle, and a couple of other places where we’d see smoke coming out. He retired, and dropped dead at a strip club about three years after.

      As the phrase goes, it ain’t the years, it’s the mileage.

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  17. Now I’ll have Queen running in my head all day. Ah, well. There are worse things.

    I tossed out an offhand comment in reference to the SPQR mythos the other day, something along the lines of: People always assume immortality would be a grand opportunity to accrue untold wealth. I figure it’s just more time to make mistakes with longer to brood over them.

    Said in jest at the time, but there’s truth in it as well. I think that any reasonably introspective person will look back and wonder at the person who was living their life back then. Not just because of growing and learning, those can be accounted for, but because time marks us with its passage without our noticing. A stone standing in a river, if you will. If I had Lazarus Long’s life how would I even recognize the earlier years as having been me?

    And being me, how often would I have to set aside regret for my foolish errors?

    Back to Queen, I suppose. The show must go on.

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              1. I used to drink, some longish time ago. I was once *paid,* not to stop drinking, but to stop *singing.*

                No sh- err kidding.

                Irony being what it is, I spent the next summer as a choir director. I can do the music thing (or could, at the time), but far as voice goes I couldn’t carry a tune if it had handles and a packstrap.

                Doesn’t mean I don’t sing with the radio in the truck when no ones around, though. *chuckle*

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                  1. *shudder* I avoid those like the doorstep of hell. In fact, I might skirt the doorstep to get clear of the kari-is-chokey.

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  18. One necessary precondition for living forever is being sane. If you’re just a little bit off, that offness will compound and multiply until you’ll be a complete mess.

    I read a story recently of a seemingly normal woman whose stubbornness and tendency to hoard things left her with a house with no heat, a leaky roof, and an unwillingness to accept help from family and a distrust for workmen who might effect repairs. Since we make Hell in our own image, so not-living-forever is a blessing in disguise for the unsane.

    There is a sort of mental flexibility that can be lost with age. Living forever requires a balance between flexibility and identity.

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    1. yes, one of the big questions about living forever in relatively youthful state is whether that would include youthful ability to learn still.

      (another one is memory.)

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      1. Indeed. I have thought that, if the proverbial djinni ever appeared and offered me three wishes, one would be for a photographic memory. *Then* we can talk about immortality.

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      2. The ability to learn is not a youthful one.

        The old saw “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is also wrong. Find a dog that could learn tricks young, and it keeps learning. Find one that cannot learn tricks as a pup, doesn’t get better.

        People are pretty much the same way …

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        1. Learning does get a bit harder as you get older. Memory doesn’t work quite as well etc. It’s neither one absolute or the other. But young animals and young people learn more easily when they are very young.

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          1. There is also the problem of getting tired of all your knowledge becoming obsolete, with corresponding diffidence about acquiring new knowledge that will also be soon obsolete. I used to be a pretty good minor-league computer maintainer but after a while I just got tired of having to learn new Windows operating systems every couple years.

            Plus there is the vast array of things I don’t care about doing, such as configuring my system to play games that would further erode the time available for reading and such time wasting pointless discussions as this. ;-)

            Point being, eventually the knowledge that you’re racing the Red Queen on her home course kills any interest in continuing the exercise.

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            1. But the rate of change in technology (and otherwise) might slow if a larger percentage of the population are immortal.

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          2. Start the training young. Give a dog that has been trained since a pup and I can generally expand on its training and teach it new things fairly easily. Give me one that at a year to a year and a half old hasn’t been taught anything but to flap its jaws when it gets close to feeding time, and I’m going to be pulling my hair out. It isn’t that I can’t train it, but it takes a tremendous amount more effort, and very seldom do you achieve the same level of results. I have never understood the people who advocate waiting until a dog is grown before you start training it, sure there are things I don’t teach them until they are older, and situations I prefer them not to be put into until they have experience, but I want the foundation already in place.

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  19. I remember thinking before I went to the Philippines that I was going to die there. That I was going to go over there and not come back. And the thought occurred that I would not be the same person when I got back as I was when I went over, so that was true, from a certain point of view.
    But I thought it was oddly comforting. We all change. We’re going to keep changing. The only way to avoid that is death. And even then, who really knows?
    So today I try not to worry about it too much, and am working on changing into a better person.

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  20. I look back on the things I did as a young Marine in Vietnam and ask myself “Who was that young idiot?” I really don’t recognize a lot of the ‘younger’ me. All the basic values and beliefs are the same, but I feel that now I would choose better (different, less insane) methods to accomplish the same things.

    My 20 year old granddaughter is visiting over the Thanksgiving break from college and I find that even with a 40+ year differences in age we ‘speak’ the same language and can communicate. Why couldn’t I do that with her father at the same age? It would be interesting to live long enough (provided the quality of life is there) to visit with her grandkids.

    “Live long and prosper” is a pretty good motto, for what is the use of a long life that is not fun, where you can continue to do meaningful (if only to you) things?

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    1. I noticed the same… in the opposite direction– may I suggest that you have more in common with the grandchild than the child? (or parent?). I noticed that with my in-laws. The grandson has a personality like my hubby (his grandfather). No one in his immediate family knows how to deal with him.

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      1. When one of nephews needed to do research on SF he called me up. Until me, no one in my family was into science fiction.

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  21. Living forever would only work if there was no physical or mental deterioration and not hierarchical. How would the younger develop if they were subject to those who were thousands of years older? What about the controlling elders, the crazy uncle (or aunt), the abusive grandparent? (of course there is a story there, but I wouldn’t want to try it now.)

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    1. In Bujold’s Vorkosigan universe the best way to deal with older people who couldn’t change any more, because they already lived through 4 or 5 new “worlds”, was to outlive them.

      The best thing is when each succeeding generation has new and different things to look forward to.

      I wouldn’t want to live in a world dominated extreme oldsters, where you were an apprentice until you were 60. Ugggh!

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      1. Not to mention other problems from slowed maturation: “I swear Officer, she said she was 41!”

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    2. I had created an alien species that (thanks to gene engineering) could like productive lives into their 5th century. Some of the leadership of the family clans encouraged the younger members to be “party animals”.

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        1. According to my notes, adolescence begins around 24 Earth Years and they are considered Young Adults at that time. Full Adulthood occurs at 36 Earth Years. Also, they are able to reach an age of 600 Earth Years but a few may live until 720 Earth Years.

          They are great at long term planning but don’t react quickly to sudden change.

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      2. I’ve read several science fiction books that postulated this with humans with longevity treatments. The one that comes to mind as going into the consequences and long term problems of it most deeply was Moon’s Serrano Legacy series. She dealt with a couple sides of it, like inheritance, etc. But the one I found most interesting was the military side, with people living for who knows how long (nobody knew how long they could live, how many times they could take the rejuvenation treatments, they hadn’t hit an upper limit yet) there was very little advancement unless war broke out. So those young people who did want to join the service had little prospects of advancement unless there was a war to provide both attrition and a reason to expand forces.

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        1. …there was very little advancement unless war broke out. So those young people who did want to join the service had little prospects of advancement unless there was a war to provide both attrition and a reason to expand forces.
          Well, that problem has already been solved.

          The promotion situation you are describing fits the US Navy (and the Army as well, I think) from before the Civil War/War Between the States/War of Northern Aggression (select as per local usage) until well into the 20th Century. This rank stagnation effect was solved with the “Up or Out” personnel management strategy after WWII, where active duty individuals face mandatory promotion boards on a fixed schedule, and if one does not pass after N attempts, one gets “asked” to leave the Navy.

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    3. “Eternal” life with one condition: you have to voluntarily emigrate from Earth. In the absence of FTL travel this would be an incentive to crew interstellar ships with experienced people of developed judgement. It would also have the benefit of forcing the immortals to adapt to new situations, preventing cultural stagnation on Terra.

      Until it is discovered that certain political leaders have received the treatment while remaining here.

      Or perhaps the treatment granting longevity has a side effect of diminishing intellectual capability as memory storage becomes swamped with no “defrag” possible. Therapists call it “Bidenization.”

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  22. My family tend not live very long. My mom died at 50 and my dad at 70. My mom had had cancer for 25 years. It took a toll on father as well. I’m only 52 but I feel older(when I don’t feel well.) We have bad genes on both sides of the family. My mom’s side of the family has various cancers and my dad’s side has various chronic diseases: Arthritis, diabetes, scoliosis, depression etc. My husband’s family is much more long lived. I felt like my life was half over at 35. However The best part of my life has been the almost 13 years I’ve been married.

    I don’t want to live forever. I’d adore if I could feel well again. I often daydream about not having diabetes or arthritis anymore. I just try to enjoy my life as it is. I feel that I’ll die in 10 years, that could be depression or doctor trying to scare me into doing what he says.

    Anyway, Happy thanksgiving!

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    1. Oddly I have both long lived and short lived isssues on both d=side of the family. Had a Great grandma live to over 100, and have had two uncles and a cousin succumb to cancer. Heart issues as well, but we seem to push through those. Arrhythmia (I can be susceptible to this if stressed) and bad heart valves (both in one aunt, she has a “toilet seat” artificial valve, and with her pacemaker she ticks like a clock) and heart attacks (Grandpa K died of a massive coronary) and weird things like my Dad’s paracarditis that caused pneumonia to slow his heart enough to kill him … luckily the jump start worked and they stuck him on nearly straight oxygen, so he is still with us, but they “forgot” to tell me he died. He remembers the heart rate monitor hitting 5bpm and everything going black.
      But several Aunts and Uncles, are in their 70s great aunts and great uncles have lived well into their 90’s.

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  23. I don’t want to live forever, but I’d like to stay healthy and relatively pain free until I die.

    Not happening, but one could wish.

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    1. I’d like to be pain-free too but it ain’t gonna happen. For those of us who read David Weber’s Honor Harrington series she had her first kid at 60! She has the health of someone a third of her age.

      I don’t want to outlive my husband. I don’t want to outlive my country–America! (Call me schismatic if you must, although I agree with most USAian principles, the name of the country is AMERICA!! like the Neil Diamond song. It’s a truly minor doctrinal difference.)

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        1. If my blood sugar numbers keep rising I think I’ll die a slow painful death from complications of diabetes.

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        2. But on the bright side, there would be plenty of semi-immortal Usaians to help carry on the ideals of their lost homeland for generations to come.

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  24. I guess I’ll chime in here too. My favorite treatment of immortality is Greg Egan’s _Border Guards_ (http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/BORDER/Complete/Border.html).

    He pretty much hits all the bases. Losing people. Generational conflicts. What do immortals *do* with themselves? Where do you put all the people? And so on. Highly recommended.

    I don’t know if I’d want to live “forever” (heck, there are times when I don’t want to live at *all*…fewer than there used to be though). Barring access to alternate, younger, universes, true immortality probably isn’t possible anyway, and would likely end up like this: http://everything2.com/title/Immortality+blows.

    Regardless, my main fear is the deterioration that comes with age. I’m 44, and in reasonably good shape, but I’ve been fighting a bad elbow (medial epicondylitis) for almost two years, and there’s no end in sight. I don’t look forward to ever more minor pains that just..don’t…go…away!

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      2. People who need constant novelty and stimulation are well advised to avoid immortality. It can be a problem in ordinary life, in some situations, already.

        This realization comes considerably later to most of my intelligent patients, however, who complain in their thirties of a vague, persistent, and severe dissatisfaction with their present existence. The excitements of their youth are over: in the culture of the slums, men and women are past their prime by the age of 25. Their personal lives are in disarray, to put it kindly: the men have fathered children with whom they have little or no contact; the women, preoccupied with meeting the increasingly imperious demands of these same children, drudge at ill-paid, boring, and impermanent jobs. (The illegitimacy rate in Britain has recently passed the 40 percent mark, and while most births are still registered in the names of two parents, relations between the sexes grow ever more unstable.) The entertainments that once seemed so compelling to both men and women—indeed, the whole purpose of life—seem so no longer. These patients are listless, irritable, and disgruntled. They indulge in self-destructive, anti-social, or irrational behavior: they drink too much, involve themselves in meaningless quarrels, quit their jobs when they can’t afford to, run up debts on trifles, pursue obviously disastrous relationships, and move house as if the problem were in the walls that surround them.

        The diagnosis is boredom, a much underestimated factor in the explanation of undesirable human conduct. As soon as the word is mentioned, they pounce upon it, almost with relief: recognition of the problem is instant, though they had not thought of it before. Yes, they are bored—bored to the very depths of their being.

        Full text here:
        http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_3_oh_to_be.html

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        1. This reminds me of a quote attributed to G.B. Shaw:
          Why are they wishing for immortality? They can’t deal with a rainy Sunday afternoon.

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                  1. Axes are a lot easier to throw. Well, I’ve actually never tried to throw a sword, but out to about fifty feet I can generally stick an axe in whatever I’m aiming at.

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                    1. Point-heavy swords, sure. Gladius is basically a freakin’ big knife. Balance issues come into play the bigger the sword you throw, unless it is forged with that in mind. Might be able to toss an epee like a light spear (its pretty light, comparatively).

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                  2. Given the mathematical inclinations of the Huns, you start playing with axes and before long somebody’s gotten rotated into n-dimensional space and acquired a limb.

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    2. I don’t look forward to ever more minor pains that just..don’t…go…away!

      That’s one of the major recurring issues in Sanderson’s Elantris, which deals with some of the fallout of an imperfect immortality.

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        2. Thanks; the same to you and many more! Every day this side of the grass is a blessing, but some of those days really make me look forward to the day when this corruptible puts on incorruption.
          Turkey day is going to be interresting. We’re spending it with the Oyster Wife’s second family, which is large and boisterous. I’m going to be looking for quiet places to hide, methinks. Fortunately, it seems the hostess’s husband is as fond of crowds as I am – maybe we’ll hide out together somewhere. :)

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          1. *grin* I got adopted by a “small” Iowa farm family some years back. By small I mean only 60 people met at Thanksgiving. I ended up hiding in the corner listening to the older gents talking tractors. Great people and wonderful food, but it was a “wee bit” overwhelming.

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  25. I’ll take a shot of Re-Juv, please! Don’t really care how long I live, but I’d like a reasonable amount of energy back. Fix the eye sight . . . Okay, take the fat and wrinkles away while you’re at it.

    Thing is, with every medical advance, we are extending the human life span.There seems to be an absolute limit, somewhere around 120 years, but more people are living longer, and the “symptoms” of old age are hitting later and later. If my body’s repair mechanisms could be stimulated enough to roll back the clock a few decades, I’ll be content to test that barrier, and possibly fail.

    But eliminating that barrier _without_ the fixup . . . nope. Not interested.

    I don’t know if it’s a matter of getting older, or just doing so much writing, but I think I’m training my brain to hand over control to my subconscious while writing, and I wonder how much of that is leaking through and influencing the way “I” think.

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    1. I am sure at this moment and also ten years ago that my subconscious does NOT want to die ;-). I had the opportunity btw. Instead of dying I stayed awake until my subconscious knew that there was someone (a German doctor this time) who took me seriously and was going to save my life. So far– I continue… unless this is the afterlife. ;-)

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    3. Keeping you alive without the fixup would be a trick and a half. After all it’s the deterioration that does you in.

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  26. I am going to wind up doing three posts on this thread, three different subjects that don’t necessarily mesh well. This first one is the minor one. I am not going to live forever. I am going to live as long as I can be an independently functional human being. I may make it to a hundred plus, if I do i will still be able to make my own meals and care for myself. If the day comes when someone else has to care for me as a small child, or worse a husk in a crypt (nursing home) I will find a way to step off the merry go round and find peace. Life can be very good at any age but, self respect is always necessary. Self esteem isn’t but, a man must be able to look into the mirror and shave.

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  27. My second point is the thought of a story where immortality and eternal youth are available. Where advancement in society is rewarded with permission from the government to age. Looking 30 is a bigger goal than getting a car, when you are able to look 30 you are considered an adult and may even be permitted to form permanent relationships with the opposite sex, with a possibility of being allowed to have children in a few hundred years when you are allowed a touch of gray at your temples.

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  28. The third is the most germane to this post. Yes you are a different person than the one that wrote the musketeers books. The person who wrote those had children entering their teens. She had not grasped her own destiny and gone indy. There are so many difference between the you that lives now and the one of a decade ago that they are scarce recognizable as related, let alone the same. This is true of all of us,I certainly am not the young idiot that free climbed the Zugspitz in dress uniform. Nor am I the callow youth that would sleep with whichever woman was amenable and be happy for the opportunity. Change is part of life, such an intrinsic part of life that those who do not change are dead, they just don’t know it. Do not mourn the young woman who wrote the earlier books, celebrate the woman who wrote AFGM. For that matter celebrate the woman whose son is about to enter med school. You are not the same person, the question you have to wrestle with is, are you a better one? I think you are. I know I am a better person than I was as a youth.

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    1. About to enter — from your mouth to G-d’s years. The system is such a mess. He should be a shoe-in but who knows?
      Am I a better person? I don’t know. But I’m grateful for several things including the fact that my then sixth grader who almost dropped out is now in college, in a demanding double major, and has learned the value of hard work.

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  29. Be careful with Poser. I have it and still find it ever so frustrating to use: it can distort figures as easily as create them and for the life of me I cannot get a character to cross his or her arms properly. The program just doesn’t allow it.

    When a character sits on a bed for example, the bed looks like it is made of concrete. No one ‘sinks into’ a soft surface, so it doesn’t look real.

    I was going to use Poser for illustrations but the outfits are limited and the faces much the same. I am sure some experienced Poser user will say I am doing it wrong, but frankly though the program seems like a good idea it can consume vast amounts of time for a not very good effect.

    On the other hand, you were talking about having a lot of time to do things.

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  30. I used to run an Illustration/cartoon ‘zine for about 14 years in the 90’s and early 2000’s. When I read some of the editorials from the early issues, I’m wondering who the hell WAS that idiot?

    Re: Immortality. In stories where the Immortal is a rarity, the topic that comes to me is, Government interaction. Now that you have ID’s and passports and SSN’s and whole life histories in Government computers (And soon, all our medical details), the old “Changing identities every 20 years or so” gambit is doomed to failure – Then what?

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    1. Travel abroad and get a new identity. A few well-placed bribes should allow that easily enough. Then re-emigrate back (or elsewhere).

      Only works so long as there are sufficient, sufficiently corrupt, countries to use for changing one’s identity, but I don’t see that as a short-term concern:-/.

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  31. “it’s had to be absolutely sure as I can’t remember which of the ten versions on the drive was the one I sent in”

    The essential tool for a writer that is most rarely used is a decent version control system. I have no idea how anyone works without one.

    You shouldn’t have ten versions of your document, you should have hundreds or thousands – one for every work session. And each should be timestamped, and annotated with a comment as to what changes you were making.

    You should be able to see, easily, exactly what changes you made when you went through, two months ago, tightening up the dialog, and you should be able to restore, easily, that scene you deleted, month last, that you decided you really need after all.

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      1. A good version control system won’t use that much space. It doesn’t store complete copies of each version, but the changes from one to the next.

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          1. William’s link above is the one my coworkers prefer. I haven’t worked with it, myself (I still use Subversion, which we started using 5 years ago), but they rave about how useful it is. It seems to have a bit of a steep learning curve, though.

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            1. Latest version’s a memory hog – but the guidelines for publishing via KDP are pretty clear and easy.

              Everyone to their own – I knew a guy who was doing short stories in EDLIN in DOS, a fairly useable line editor. Said it was just like using a typewriter, except it was easier to backspace and do corrections.

              Don’t think he ever sold anything, though.

              We’ve come a long, long way.

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            2. Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but adding things like emphasis (Italics, Bold, All Caps, etc) is not something I want to go back and do later, because I might not remember what I was thinking then. I suppose you could add tags of some sort, though.

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              1. I’m tempted to jump into a discussion of the distinction between semantic markup and visual styling, but I’m going to restrain myself.

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                1. I’d say jump in. Some of us might not know of the alternatives, and not know what we don’t know. If’n you’re feeling educational and not sarcastic or summat.

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                  1. The idea is pretty simple – we should write in terms of semantic concepts, not in terms of visual appearance. Not in terms of “insert a blank line here”, or “switch to italic”, but “this is a paragraph”, and “this is emphasized text”.

                    Technical writers have been using tools like these for decades, like nroff, and TeX. The latest is do book, which is an XML schema specifically designed for constructing techical documentation. From the markup, you can produce html content, pdf files, typesetter proofs, or word documents, with automatically generated tables of contents, lists of figures, indexs, bibliogaphies, endnotes, etc.

                    That said, I usually don’t bother. I ignore the fine semantic structure until late in the process, and work in plain text. Worrying about how it’s organized is just as unprductive as worrying about how it looks. It can wait until I have all the actual writing done.

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                    1. Hm. More stuff to look into. Would researching those programs get me down the road to seeing how it works in practice?

                      I’d like to be able to write conceptually (absent specific formatting cues) and be able to move that product into whatever platform is needed without major overhaul. But I just don’t have the background in the right fields to have any experience with alternatives to the standard word processors.

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    3. One could always use the computer program paradigm of STORY TITLE V1.a and save as V1.b until sufficient changes have occurred to go to V2.a … how you decide that point is reached is a question for the individual. Perhaps STORY TITLE V1.aaabrq doesn’t engender nausea for some.

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      1. I’d like to point out that I can’t even imagine having several hundred thousand versions. In most cases there isn’t enough difference to WARRANT ten versions. I think Noah’s Boy has two — pre and post editorial edit.

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        1. Well, don’t worry about that high a number, it’s an extreme case. For you, it’s possibly not as important to keep the smaller changes while writing, because you do the “forge ahead, come back and fix later” method, which I’m guessing not everyone does (I certainly would not). If you were using a version control program, however, you would still possibly want to save a new version every day that you added to it. For editing, the versioning is highly useful, because if you change a paragraph in a certain location today, then change some other things the next day, then come back around and think, “I wonder if the original of THIS paragraph (or sentence) would work better with what I changed over HERE…” you can go back and look at the progression of changes over time, which can clue you in on what you were thinking that day, and whether it meshed with what you were thinking the next day, and so forth.

          Also, if you somehow made a mistake and lost a large swath of text without realizing it, and saved the changes, they would still be there in the work history, with dates, and you can compare multiple versions to see what was lost. And all of this without it cluttering your file system, because it combines it into one blob of data elsewhere, and just presents you with options for use.

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        2. Don’t think “version”, think “revisons”. Ever make a temporary copy, because you want to try something, and aren’t sure it’ll work? Check in your work before you make the changes. If you decide later it was a mistake, you can revert them.

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  32. I have NO desire to live forever. I merely wish to get caught up on my reading. Forever won’t be long enough.

    OTOH, doesn’t being able to look back and see how callow you was represent evidence of growth? OF course, as Dorian Gray, Ebeneezer Scrooge & Senator Joseph Paine would attest, not all growth is good growth.

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  34. “In some ways, as I get older, I seem to become more and more myself.”

    I have noticed a tendency as I have gotten older to be much less concerned about how others view me. It is sort of “this is how I am, sorry if that upsets you”.

    On the other hand I think I have become at least a little more considerate of other folks feelings. I have friends and industry colleagues who do things and hold opinions I strongly disagree with. While I will not back down from my opinions, I also feel no particular need to confront them over their beliefs. There seems to be little point in being confrontational for its own sake.

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  35. Sarah,
    If anyone else had written the Musketeer mysteries I would not have bought and read them. I have finished the first two and downloaded the third. I see pretty much the same Sarah writing them all. For the Musketeers you had to get into a certain character to write them the way you did.
    On the other hand, we all change over time, which is natural. So don’t freak out over changing, I certainly have.

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  36. (Raises hand, though I’m under no illusions it will happen in my generation). Actually, let’s caveat that: I never woke up one day wanting to die. (After caffienation)

    I can imagine certain extreme situations where I might, but with care against crippling injury, maintained sanity, and a lack of implacably sadistic adversaries, I should be able to avoid those. Under normal circumstances I (however I might change) would probably continue to wake up not wanting to die today.

    The fact that we don’t have a choice in the matter eventually is a medical/maintenence problem, not a profound necessity of being, IMO. At least, not any more necessary than saber-tooth tigers, the plague, or other pleasant aspects of our primordial condition.

    One of the things that brings home how cosmically unnecessary death due to old age is are the premature aging syndromes, where children will have organ deterioration, hardening of the heart, grey hair and hair loss, wrinkled skin etc – many of the usual symptoms (though not always all of them) well before natural old age. Certain genes flip, certain counters run out, and our bodies simply stop repairing themselves and fall apart over the course of a couple of decades. In healthy people this happens in stages from 35 to 80. In these children it happens when they’re toddlers.

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  37. _Beastmen of Mars_ from the _Space 1889_ RPG covers “what happens to people who are effectively immortal”.

    Hint: The last survivor of the race has formed a Death Cult….

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  38. In Anne Bishop’s Dark Jewels trilogy (the first three books in the series), one of the characters becomes a semi-immortal in order to hold back the tide of evil long enough that the cure can be born. After the victory, he makes his farewells and lets go. I get the sense that the final passing came as a relief, both physical and emotional.

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  39. I also have a strong desire to live forever, or at least, live a very long time…but I’ve often wondered what would happen to society, if everyone did so. G-d and evolution both decree (yes, they are accomplices in this) that we live to about a maximum of 120 years; a fuse of sorts is even built into our very genes. This has caused me to wonder just /why/ mortality is built-in to us?

    One very strong reason that comes to mind is a quote from a certain physicist–I think he was a physicist–who said that, contrary to popular belief, science doesn’t advance when someone comes up with a better theory, and everyone adopts it. It advances when the old guard, who absolutely won’t accept the new theory, dies off, and the younger generation grows up learning only the new. So I suspect that one reason why we are mortal–we become stale in our beliefs.

    If we achieve immortality, or even long lives, I suspect that we’ll have to do something to keep things stirred up. I would suppose that one solution is to do the Lazarus Long thing, and change entire career tracks ever twenty to forty years…

    It so happens that I’m reading Genesis right now, and I just read about Noah’s flood; this is when G-d decreed that our lifespans be limited to 120 years. Perhaps this is because the older we get, the more difficult it is to transmit our values to the younger generations; perhaps it’s even the case that our morals themselves slip as we get older…

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  40. There was an SF book called “Cloud Chamber” which I cannot find on Amazon now… It postulated reincarnation, and the ability to remember your past lives. See, the biggest issue I would have, is neuroses… embarrassments, things I wish had gone differently, etc — sometimes they build up and overwhelm a person. If you had multiple lives full of them (or one really long life), how could you survive sane?
    …
    “Cloud Chamber” answered this, in a way, by indicating that everyone had psychological counseling, and worked to remove every neurosis in their entire time line, so that they did stay sane.
    …
    Now, starting over again and again is different in many ways than simply living a long time, but still… I can see several lives full of things to do, but Heinlein’s Lazarus Long? No way, dude.

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