/lit/ - Literature

I read Jack Vance's 1956 sci-fi novel To Live Forever, AKA Clarges, a book set in an advanced city that has conquered disease and mortality but remains a dystopia. To avoid overpopulation, life-lengthening treatments are administered in stages by the local government, but only for doing good works. The city's inhabitants are thereby obsessed with striving towards progressing towards immortality, the preceding stages of which form the rigid caste system.

The plot concerns Waylock, a man who has fallen foul of this society, having relinquished his right to be immortal by murdering a rival press baron. At the outset of the novel he emerges from exile, having been presumed dead, and strives towards immortal status once again. He is a amoral, ruthless, dogged, and clever, an anti-hero. He is consistently thwarted by a young immortal woman with a grudge against him; and his tanglings with the beautiful antagonist make up much of the novel.

Waylock enters myriad jobs as we see both the winners and losers of his society: immortals, near-immortals, mental-cases, assassins, rebels, beurocrats, lackeys. Vance depicts a people who have attained immortality but who remain in menial servitude; he targets meaningless careerism and the conservatism and complacency of the comfortable. By the end of the book he offers a solution, a way of adding meaning to increasingly long lives. This book is a fast read, and will also have interest to cyberpunk readers with its mind-altering drugs, flying cars, skyways, simulacra, double identities and memory transfer. The plotting is superb, the dialogue is witty, and the ending is satisfying, so the book deserves four out of five dinosaurs.