Comments on: The Highlander Model

By: effinayright

effinayright — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:25:25 +0000

Is topic reminds me of the Christian idea of “Heaven”. What is one supposed to DO for all eternity? I get the idea of being reunited with loved ones, but what about the bazillion people born after you die? are you supposed to have a relationship with them, when they eventually arrive in Heaven? And what about intelligent beings on other planets? Do they have someplace else to go to when they die?

By: Bill Woods

Bill Woods — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:05:57 +0000

“Always remember: in the end, there can be a whole of us.”

Is there a word missing, like “… a whole lot of us”?

Or am I missing your meaning?

Nope, you got it. Text is corrected. Thanks! (It’s a goof on the Highlander tagline.) — Phil

By: Sally Morem

Sally Morem — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 21:11:52 +0000

Oops, my information is outdated. Stableford has published more Emortality novels since last time I checked. There are six novels and one young adult novel in the series.

“In the introduction to his 2007 collection, The Tree of Life and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution, Stableford describes this series as “tracking the potential effects of possible developments in biotechnology on the evolution of global society. It can be considered a modified version of the future history mapped out in The Third Millennium: A History of the World 2000-3000 A.D. (Sidgwick & Jackson 1985, written in collaboration with David Langford).
“The broad sweep of this future history envisages a large-scale economic and ecological collapse in the twenty-first century brought about by global warming and other factors, followed by the emergence of a global society designed to accommodate human longevity (although that is not necessarily obvious in stories set in advance of the Crash).”

By: Sally Morem

Sally Morem — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 21:03:14 +0000

Maybe we could borrow SF writer Brian Stableford’s word, “emortality.” He wrote three novels about this concept. The people in the future depicted live very long lives, but for reasons discussed in this post, they don’t consider themselves immortal. So, they call themselves emortal.