It's been a while since I've read a book as dark and hopeless as THE POSTMORTAL. For all its faults, I have to give it some credit for being so appreciably grim, not that that's new territory for a dystopia, but even for that it gave me the total creeps.
The novel posits that in the near future, a scientist working on an Alzheimer's drug accidentally invents an immortality treatment that causes people who take it to stay at the same age they are, and never get older -- so they can't die of "natural causes." This becomes known as "the cure" and becomes so popular on the black market that the President is forced to legalize it just to keep people from buying false toxic products.
Part of the "fun" of this book is exploring just how the world goes to hell in a scenario where people take "the cure," and the benefits are fast outweighed by the drawbacks. For one thing, and I'd never thought of this, the extra burden to the planet's natural resources created by having that many more people around (and in some cases them having second families decades after their first, because they can! Because they're still young!) is an environmental disaster. Our guide through this horrible future is John Farrell, a lawyer (at first) whose firm invents the "cycle marriage," effectively a marriage with an expiration date for people who didn't know when they said "forever" that it was going to actually be forever, and that causes a lot of social problems. He helps build the world not by being super naive and annoying, but on the survival level: If you're going to live forever and you have to quit your job, you can't retire -- so what other jobs can you take? What industries are open to you? And what if, having gotten the cure, you decide you don't want to live forever any more?
THE POSTMORTAL is frequently weird and sometimes gross, but it does kind of a sideways-step toward questions of medical ethics that I wouldn't have expected -- which is why I can't say I was entirely comforted when I closed the book and it was over.
4 comments:
The creepiest depiction of immortality I've read is Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Island of the Immortals" (included among CHANGING PLANES, among other anthologies). It very quickly persuaded me that immortality was not something I'd want to sign up for.
(But ask me again when I'm actually facing death, and I might think differently.)
Dinosaur Comics is rather apropos to this topic.
(If you're not familiar with Dinosaur Comics, the general conceit is that the artist uses the same panels for every comic, and just changes the captions.)
Isn't this Tuck Everlasting for adults? I was quite moved by that book as a second grader (that is not sarcasm)
-8yearoldsdude
@Elizabeth: That is eerie timing. But yeah, that cuts to the chase.
@8yearoldsdude: Yes, if you take all the dreaminess out and put in a lot of violence and some sex. I remember being quite moved by that book, too.
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