To Live Forever, a review

The following is my review of To Live Forever, Jack Vance's first "mature" novel, predating even The Languages of Pao. It was published in 1956. Warning: huge spoilers ahead.

The megalopolis of Clarges is the last civilized enclave of a future Earth that has reverted to savagery. There, the secret of immortality has been discovered. But it can't be given to everybody: that would cause runaway overpopulation. Therefore, a division of the citizenry into a pyramidal rank structure is established. Each rank (or "phyle") is conceded a longer timespan than the one immediately below, the comparatively few people in the top rank being granted full immortality. The task of killing the persons that have exceeded their allotted lifespans is carried out by an assassin organization under the control of the government.

Upward mobility in the rank structure is allowed on strictly meritocratic principles. Excel in your field of activity and you will rise your "slope":

At this time the word "slope" was charged with special meaning. Slope as the measure of a man's rise through the phyle; it traced the shape of his past, foretold the time of his ultimate passing. By the strictest definition, slope was the angle of a man's lifeline, the derivative of his achievements with respect to his age.

Rise you slope enough, and you will move up phyle. This calculus-related metaphor for human striving within society reminds of Evgenij Zamjatin's We, only in that novel the metaphor used was an integral, not a derivative (quite appropiate for a collectivist dystopia).

The perpetual striving for excellence has brought a flourishing of the arts and sciences, but it also takes its toll on the citizens. Since the number of people in each phyle is fixed, competition for longer lifespans is a brutally unforgiving zero-sum game, a grim rat race. Increasing numbers of people can't stand the psychological pressure and become "cattos": they enter a catathonic state interrupted by occasional lapses into maniacal violence. The movie Zardoz, which also deals with the theme of immortality, featured something very similar: the apathetics. But apatethics become so because of boredom and ennui, not because of the unbearable stress of competition (anyway, let me assure you that there is no diaper-wearing Sean Connery in Vance's novel).

The irony that the chance for immortality ends up, in a way, enslaving the citizenry, is explicitly stated by one character who is given an offer to abandon Clarges:

"I could not leave my surrogates; our empathy would fail; our souls would diverge; there would be no identification, no continuity. I would not dare take them along, there is too much risk of total termination. So " -she made a wan gesture- " I am fettered by my own freedom."

See also the post Freeing Constraints at Philosophy, et cetera.

The novel's protagonist is characteristically vancean: somewhat of an outsider, who is inflicted what he thinks is a wrong and sets out to find justice, exposing in the process the contradictions of the society in which he lives, and ultimately causing the downwall of the ruling order. However, he is harder-edged and more ruthless than other vancean main characters (except for Cugel). Maybe because he acutely perceives the zero-sum game nature of his society; that each extension to your life comes from the shortening of another's:

Waylock nodded. "One Amaranth per two thousand population is the allowed ratio. When you were received into the Amaranth Society, an element of information entered the Actuarian. Two thousand black wagons went forth on their missions; two thousand doors opened; two thousand despairing creatures left their homes, climbed the three steps; two thousand times"

...

"It is simple dog-eat-dog," said Waylock. "It's basic battle for survival, fiercer and more brutal than ever before in the history of man. You have blinded yourself; you subscribe to false theories; you are permeated with your obsession not only you but all of us. If we faced the facts of existence, our palliatories would be less crowded."

The novel also features many other motifs that would become mainstays in Vance's work: the seedy fair-like place where the members of a society that suffers unacknowledged problems come to find catharsis (Alastor: Wyst), the spurned lover that creates a clone of the woman who rejected him, a gusto for describing theatrical representations (Emphyrio, Showboat World), an interest in foods, a skeptical view of religion... There's even a veiled reference to Lyonesse.

The weak points of the book are unlikely decisions on the part of some of the characters (though neccesary for the plot, the way by which the protagonist becomes Vice-Chancellor is somewhat of a strech) and, most of all, the wholly unconvincing avenues for humanity proposed after the downfall of the old order, and the return of the prospect of overpopulation. One is to go into space, the other to colonize the rest of the barbaric Earth:

"Where is this living space, where can we go to find it? First, in all the various wildernesses and Nomad-lands of Earth. We must expand, we must take our way to the barbarians; but we must go as pilgrims and missionaries, not as soldiers."

This is exceedingly naive (or maybe cynical). "The immortal man's burden", so to speak. And going into space would delay the problem for a time, only to be encountered later on a vastly larger scale. This failure to come up with viable alternatives is not surprising. The field of population ethics is a very thorny one, as shown by Derek Parfit with his Repugnant Conclusion. The possibility of vastly varying, artificially determined lifespans within a society only complicates it more (has any philosopher already dealt with this?).

Vance seems to think that the quandary is an inevitable product of human progress:

The events which brought the desperate surge to the streets of Clarges represented a culmination to the Industrial Revolution, to the defeat of disease in the twentieth century, to the Malthusian Chaos, to the Reach of Clarges itself. They were a product of civilization, and in this sense foreordained.

To Live Forever is an interesting speculation on the problems of immortality, but its real merit lies in exploring a more general (and unsettling) notion: that in the allocation of limited resources, even perfect meritocracies are not exempted from tensions.