Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

I had a plan for that BINGO slot but covid having locked the libraries down means I need to look for an alternative.

I'm looking more for a book that deals with immortality rather than just having an immortal character (otherwise any vampire/god/angel/whatever book would count and that's too easy). Doesn't mean the book can't be about a vampire, but it needs to deal a lot about the fact that the vampire is immortal (losing all your mortal friends, getting bored with forever, etc), and not just be something that happens to come up in passing.

I did read the Mortal Instruments YA series, and there you have a mortal and an immortal in a relationship, but since it was just side story for secondary characters and not what the book itself was about, decided it didn't count (unless I get desperate and find nothing else LOL)

A couple I found with the help of Google (and which were available on OpenLibrary) were:

This Immortal by Roger Zelazny (but seems more just an immortal character and not about the consequences of being immortal?)

The Boat of a Million Years by Poul Anderson (this looks pretty promising)

Immortality, Inc. by Robert Sheckley

Not books, but the TV series Highlander and the movie [The Man From Earth], both dealt with a lot of the short-term issues of being immortal. The movie He Never Died to a lesser degree.

The three examples you give are all from authors from way back - all now deceased, I think (unless they have concealed something . . .)
Try a current author - Patrick LeClerc. Not well known, so far as I am aware - but in my opinion, he deserves to be!
Just for interest - compare his own biography and employment with that of his hero - he writes what he knows!.
My review:- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

"This Immortal" is pretty tongue in cheek on the subject of immortality. It was originally a short story titled "And Call Me Conrad" because no one is quite sure if he is immortal & Zelazny wrote it so that looked at one way, he might just be Pan. It's fantastic, but filled with allusions that really make it. Unless you have a good grounding in the classics, they'll fly right by & then it's just a fun story.

I haven't read that book by Anderson, but Sheckley's book was the basis for the movie "Freejack" (1992) starring Emilio Estevez, Rene Russo, & Mick Jagger. I think it's a lot of fun, but it's completely unlike the book which is more of a morality tale & isn't really about immortality at all - just souls.

Thorn is the 4th in Saberhagen's Dracula series & deals more with the topics you're looking into. It stands well on its own, but it's more fantasy. Think of it as a possibility.

Zelazny wrote quite a few books around immortality. Today We Choose Faces is an SF murder mystery with immortality through clones & selective memory/personality 'evolution'. Lord of Light reads like a fantasy, but is SF, a colony ship on a strange planet where the crew set themselves up as the Hindu pantheon to lord it over the passengers. They grow clone bodies & transfer into them.

RAH wrote in exactly what you're looking for with Methuselah's Children & follow up, Time Enough for Love. He wrote more after that, but I can't recommend them. Terrible.

Hmm., these come to mind. Could fit the category?

Maybe The Kingdom of Gods, it's the 3rd in a series though. But you could probably read it as a stand alone. Deals with the context of being long-lived god. The second in the series could also work it follows mortal people interacting with immortals The Broken Kingdoms

Maybe The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. Groundhogs day situation but with lives...?

I used Max Gladstone's Empress of Forever. Quite unlike his Craft series, it's a stand-alone in an almost incomprehensible universe where pretty much anything can happen, and often does. Definitely not for hard-SF fans. Interesting characters, though; almost all immortal.

Watching Netflix's new movie The Old Guard reminded me it's based on a graphic novel, The Old Guard, which is about immortals.

One other idea if you want something long (7 books), Elizabeth Moon's Space Opera Familias Regnant series, starting with Hunting Party. There's a new rejuvenation treatment that lets those who can afford it have practical immortality. Each book has its own unique crisis to be resolved, but the strains the new treatment is placing on a previously stable polity is a theme throughout. It's available in print as a couple of omnibus editions, and individual ebooks.

Thanks for all the ideas, will definitely look into all of them, see what catches my fancy.

And though my samples were all SF, I'm definitely open to fantasy too.

Poonam wrote: "Maybe The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. Groundhogs day situation but with lives...?."

I don't know if strictly speaking this book belong to that category, but it's terrific and well worth bending the rules :)

Andrea wrote: "And though my samples were all SF, I'm definitely open to fantasy too."

When you mentioned Fantasy I recalled Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower, a story covering a lot of ground from the PoV of an immortal but not powerful "god". It covers a lot of time before settling into a particular storyline. Stand-alone.

For my own challenge my criterion was looser for that slot, using the "with" rather than the "about" option in "about/with immortality", and initially I was using Lothaire, part of the Immortals After Dark series -- it even has the word in the series title! But I moved that to the "fantasy in modern world" instead, and put The Final Empire in the slot instead, since the Lord Ruler was immortal.

But for you, might I semi-jokingly suggest Life, the Universe and Everything? Though he's a minor character in the book, the character Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged is a humourous study on how someone might deal with the sheer enormity of time once they gain immortality. Too many works about immortality tend toward the morose.

(And the previous book in the series had a similar exploration of the effect on the human mind of a full understanding of the enormity of the universe.)

The Joy of Erudition wrote: "But for you, might I semi-jokingly suggest Life, the Universe and Everything?"

Hmm, I read And Another Thing... which include a few immortal characters trying to figure out what to do with their time, Wowbagger was a major character in that one, and the god Thor was decently prominent too. I might just use that since it's easy to find another "humour" book for the other BINGO slot. It didn't occur to me because it was in a book intended to be funny, but in fact since it's a cynical, sarcastic type of humour there is a seriousness to it too. While trying to insult every person in the universe (alphabetically) as a way to pass the time is a silly use of forever, it's also a kind of depressing view of having to live forever and finding a purpose that will last long enough.

And frankly, not matter how many times Arthur Dent gets killed, he keeps coming back...

Thanks for pointing that out!

I'm still considering some of the other options, but since I've already read this one...and I'm reading The Heroes of Olympus by Rick Riordan already that could take the "humour" slot easily enough, it will come down to what time I have left in the year to read what I planned to read and can I squeeze in one more or not :)

I haven't read And Another Thing... I've read all of Douglas Adams' novels, but I don't know Eoin Colfer's work. I'm surprised you say it has both Wowbagger and Thor in it. So it's a crossover, I suppose? In any case, maybe I'll read it, too.

The Golden Key might fit. Main protagonist finds a way of extending his life, effectively becoming immortal, and the story jumps through his history. It’s by Rawn, Elliot and Roberson

I highly recommend Kage Baker's Company series, which starts with In the Garden of Iden. It's about a group of immortal operatives working for the enigmatic Dr. Zeus corporation who travel back in time - blending in with the setting - to save important artifacts. Mendoza, a botanist, is my favourite character.

The Joy of Erudition wrote: "I haven't read And Another Thing... I've read all of Douglas Adams' novels, but I don't know Eoin Colfer's work. I'm surprised you say it has both Wowbagger and Thor in it. So it's a crossover, I s..."

Thor is from the Dirk Gently books right? Haven't read those so can't comment on the crossover aspect. Basically Colfer didn't like the ending of the six book trilogy so he wrote his own version of how everything ends. I guess it's a kind of glorified fanfic with permission from the Douglas estate to publish it.

Have you read the Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice? Yes, vampires. But the series is quite epic and after the first book mostly follows Lestat who struggles with his own identity and purpose over the centuries. Some of the books follow others as well and follow their "evolution" or "devolution" over time and what they experienced over the length of their lives.

Andrea wrote: "Thor is from the Dirk Gently books right?"

Yes, from the second Dirk Gently book only. I actually prefer the Dirk Gently books over the Hitchhiker books, myself, though I thought the first one was the best.

JK wrote: "Have you read the Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice? Yes, vampires. But the series is quite epic and after the first book mostly follows Lestat who struggles with his own identity and purpose over th..."

Couldn't use that one since I've read them all. But some of the ancient vampires really do delve into the consequences of being immortal, like the one about Marius, or even when you just consider the "thing" the queen becomes, more a creature of stone, not worth the effort of even moving anymore, life too boring to interact with the world anymore kind of thing.

G33z3r wrote: "Andrea wrote: "And though my samples were all SF, I'm definitely open to fantasy too."

When you mentioned Fantasy I recalled Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower, a story covering a lot of..."

Thoroughly enjoyed this book!

Since G33z3r mentioned it above, thought I'd mention I just found The Old Guard #1 available for free on Amazon.ca, not sure how long that will last.

It's more on the lighter side, but there's always Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series. I'm on the app, so I can't link. On a Pale Horse was one of the books in the series, and it centered around the incarnation of Death.

Read this novella a very long time ago, so the memory is a bit faded. It isn't a deep exploration of immortality but you'll see from the quote that it enters in to the plot. "The herd" refers to humanity in general.

"They had kept their herd of contented, helpless, shortlived cattle long enough. The herd had prospered until it competed with its unseen owners for food and space. Like any good husbandman, the immortals had decided to thin the herd out.”
― Frederik Pohl, Drunkard's Walk

Gene Doucette has written a 6-book series called the Immortal series, It's about Adam and how he has survived through the ages.

Tor has a short blog post with some suggestions for immortal women, the comments of course include some more - https://www.torforgeblog.com/2020/10/...