The Immortals [Paperback]

The Immortals is a novel about the search for immortality and the corruption it was bound to engender. Marshall Cartwright sells a pint of his 'type O negative' blood (sounds like a band name or something, doesn't it?) to a blood bank for a fifty dollar bounty. Later, his blood is given to a dying eighty year old billionaire, Leroy Weaver, who not only miraculously makes a full recovery but loses years in a matter of hours until he appears to be in his twenties. Much to everybody's chagrin the change is temporary and Weaver is back to his original state in forty days (enough time for the donated blood to wash out of the body). Weaver's doctor, Dr. Russell Pearce, figures out what happened and traced the blood back to the transient Cartwright, whom he figures out to be immortal.

Thus begins the greatest manhunt in the history of the world. A foundation is set up by the world's wealthiest and most influential elders, lasting almost a century, whose main task is to track down Cartwright and or his descendants, with a secondary purpose of funding research for the synthesis of Cartwright's blood globulin.

The Immortals was written in the fifties and has been updated with the twenty-first century technology. The story covers a period in excess of a hundred years in five parts. It sometimes seems disjointed and that may be because the book is an assemblage of related short stories that the author, James, over fifty years ago.

Overall I found the book a little hard to follow, especially Part IV "The Medic" which was fairly confusing at first. The novel purports a future in which the medical establishment effectively takes over the economy of the world, sometimes in direct conflict with established and renegade governments. With each succeeding part, the world degenerates more into a Mad Max style anarchy, with roving gangs and marauders, street wise poor, fortified estates for the elite and local governments, (sometimes the same thing) and lastly the Citadel like Hospitals, sometimes covering several square miles in area, usually within the most dangerous urban areas.

There are some even more gruesome parts like when someone defaults on a prohibitively expensive Health Contract, they are taken into custody and put on life support and kept alive in a harvesting warehouse, where their bodies are harvested for body parts. Also, their seems to be two types of roving gangs - head hunters which kill and take heads for a bounty or body snatchers, (my term) where they capture humans alive to use for body parts for an even larger bounty.

Conclusion

This book certainly paints a dreary picture for the future. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the inspiration for doomsday movies like the aforementioned Mad Max/Road Warrior, A boy and his Dog, The Postman and Waterworld.

We never get to meet the Immortal Marshall Cartwright but we do get to meet three of his female descendants. The protagonist of the story seems to be Dr. Russell Pearce, who keeps popping up throughout the book. I like the fact that the book was updated and had things like DNA and computers that weren't really around in 1955.

The book consists of 301 pages of fairly large type of which I estimate less than eighty thousand words, so it is a pretty quick read. I picked up this book because it was written by James Gunn who had also authored one of my favorite sci-fi books "The Joy Makers". I don't think "The Immortals" compares that well with "The Joy Makers" but it does have some very interesting aspects and is well worth a quick read, despite some confusing parts.

Final rating 3.6 stars

Like most people, I first became aware of James Gunn's "The Immortals" through the old TV series, "The Immortal." When I found the book (a collection of short stories written in the 1950's), I noticed that while the TV pilot episode followed the first tale fairly closely, none of the material in the other stories (set in a medical dystopia unfolding over the next 150 years) was used. Not only that, but Gunn did not focus on the immortals at all in his stories, but on the rich who wanted to use their blood to gain immortality, and on those in the medical profession who either fought it or went along with it. Marshall Cartwright, the first of the immortals, probably had fewer than a half-dozen lines in all of Gunn's stories, and is only a shadowy presence in the last of them. In a way, this leaves the reader somewhat unsatisfied. We want a detailed interview with these fascinating people and their view on the unfolding of history. But, Gunn saw them as ordinary people who just happened to live a long time, people who were hunted down and ultimately used to provide life for those with the most money

James Gunn's book from the 50's is amazingly rescued in the 21st century by the author, himself. Subtle changes from the original don't keep me from enjoying this book.
I wish I had been able to find it years ago.