To Live Forever by Jack Vance
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Perhaps there is a touch of the Weird in all of us After accidentally killing a rival newspaper man seven years ago, the Grayven Warlock had to feign his own death, abandon his immortal Amaranth class, and start living under an assumed identity as Gavin Waylock (one wonders why he chose a name so similar to his real one!). Gavin’s ambition is to work his way from the bottom Brood rank back up to his true Amaranth status. Complicating his agenda is the Jaycinth Martin, a newly minted immortal 19-year-old Amaranth beauty discovers Gavin’s secret, conceives an implacable hatred for him as a “Monster,” and Welcome to “Clarges, the last metropolis of the world,” an ancient, futuristic sf uber-city of skyscrapers “tall enough to intercept passing clouds,” tubes, slide-ways, and air-cabs, and myriad shops and millions of denizens. Its outstanding feature (that makes it the most envied/hated city in the world) is being a sealed culture forbidding immigration while offering citizens the chance to become immortal. The core of Clarges’ hyper democratic-capitalist system is the Fair-Play Act, whereby one’s public and social achievements are reflected in the angle of one’s “slope” as determined by the Actuarian computers. Careers are called “strivings,” and the steeper one’s slope, the farther and faster one may ascend through the five ranks of “phyle” (status), each with more years of healthier life than the last: Brood, Wedge, Arrant, Verge, and Amaranth. Amaranth bequeaths youthful immortality on the successful social climber, as well as the privilege of making five “surrogates” (clones) to serve as backups in case something unfortunate happens to you. The Jaycinth Martin was, in fact, 104 and running out of time when she became a 19-year-old Amaranth. The flaw in the Fair-Play Act is that, in order to prevent disastrous overpopulation (which 300 years before resulted in the near collapse of the civilization), people have time limits for ascending to each level, the failure to meet which results in visits from the Assassins. And for each new member of the Amaranth, about 2,000 people must be euthanized from the lower ranks in order to maintain the population at an optimum number. About a fifth of the populace opt out of the Fair-Play system, remaining (Dr. Seussian) “glarks” who live a mere 82 years and have low social status. The stress of striving to ascend through the phyle to Amaranth (“Up the slope, devil take the hindmost”) and of being aware that one’s clock is ticking turns an increasing number of Clarges denizens into unorganized “Weirds” lurking in the shadows to stone citizens punished in the Cage of Shame or into members of cult-like political groups like the Whitherers or to let off steam in Carnevalle, a Las Vegas-like adult theme park where “Compunction no longer existed; virtue and vice had no meaning.” Due to all the mental illnesses afflicting the stressed-out citizenry, Gavin decides to start working at a Palliatory (mental hospital), caring for a ward full of “cattos” (cationic-maniac syndrome patients), reckoning that such work may earn him enough “career points” to move up-slope quickly. Unfortunately for Gavin, the obsessed Jaycinth Martin starts drawing upon the formidable resources of the Amaranths and Assassins to relentlessly persecute the “Monster.” The picaresque story is compact and unpredictable. Vance’s vision of capitalist dog-eat-dog competition whose ultimate goal is immortality is interesting. He writes neat set-piece scenes, like a Pan Arts Union exhibition of the water sculptures of a spaceship navigator and the skits of a professional mime and a Zoom-like meeting for the 229th conclave of the Amaranth society to decide if Gavin Waylock is martyr or monster. He sketches concise, vivid, often grotesque descriptions of characters (e.g., "a bushy dark-browed man crouched over his desk like a dog over a bone") and sets them verbally fencing with his anti-hero, as when the Jaycinth explains her fervid persecution of Gavin by saying, “I'm an ordinary person with strong feelings,” and Gavin warningly replies, “So am I.” Dry Vance-isms abound, like “I find your humor superfluous,” and “Who is hated more than the lucky bungler.” Violence breaks out suddenly and unpredictably. While for the majority of Clarges citizens “Death is the vilest word in the language, the ultimate obscenity” (“transition” being the preferred term), some, like a Whitherer woman Gavin gets to know, suspect that “all people have a desire for dissolution.” Vance’s 1956 novel is an sf satire of 20th-century American culture, with superior health care for the wealthy, almost everyone engaged in a competitive race to the top, and everyone vulnerable to succumbing to a variety of psychological disorders due to the stress of that competition. As a character says, “Perhaps there is a touch of the Weird in all of us.” The novel does suggest a path to sanity and viability: looking outward from one’s hermetically “safe” home, including a spaceship called the Star Enterprise seeking new worlds for humanity (which made me think that the Star Trek creators may have read this 1956 novel). The ending feels hurried, but fans of Vance or of vintage ahead-of-its-time sf should like the compact novel, which is well read by audiobook reader Kevin Kennerly. View all my reviews
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