Pure vs. impure immortality...

[Darth Angelus]

Hi!

What I am about to say will not come as any surprise or news to those of you familiar with the genre, which will probably be most people here. In fact, it may very well come off as stating the obvious to you.
Yet, I think the theory I am forming in my mind to explain this distinction may help with the confusion a novice might have on the subject of immortality, and feedback from others who are familiar with speculative fiction would be welcome.

The basic idea is fairly simple. I think all eternal life, in genres where it might exist, can be boiled down to these two main categories...


- The pure (or clean, if you will) type:
This is not considered twisted or wrong, or in any way condemned by the work itself. The word "unnatural" will NOT ever be used to describe it. It has no particular, nasty side effects, nor any heavy price*. As such, it is described as completely acceptable by the work itself, and the protagonists (including the "wise" ones) in it.
This type will often be in some way blessed or sanctified by some higher power held up as being good and benevolent, and thus the "power source" that the immortality can be traced back to is also pure.
It does not take any deep familiarity with the works of Tolkien to realize that the immortality of the elves would fall into this pure category. To develop this further, if we trace back Tolkien's elves to their ultimate origin, they were the firstborn created by Eru (the One God in Tolkien's works), whereas men were the secondborn. Hence, the elves were immortal because God decided they would be. I am not Christian myself, but Tolkien was, and I understand the basic idea, just as I am sure most who read this will. The immortality of Tolkien's elves very much had divine blessing behind it.
Another type of being in myth and Fantasy that may possess this type of immortality I here call "pure" would be angels, or their equivalent.

- The impure kind:
This is the type of sustained life that is often described as "unnatural", and according to the work and its protagonists, it should not be. When someone with a (ofte wise) mentor role says it is time for someone's unnatural life to end, that "everything"** has its time and "everything"** dies (in the context of commenting on some character's immortality), you can be sure it is this type.
Clearly, any type of undead will invariably belong to this impure kind, but there are also other types, such as characters kept alive through dark magic/ritual and/or by sacrificing others (possibly by sucking their life force out of them), kept alive through evil artifacts or maybe even technology if it just sustains life without sustaining any semblance of the character's natural state.
With the possible exception of someone else being sacrificed for the impure immortality (where the sacrificed person could be said to pay the price instead), sources granting impure immortality will tend to have nasty and wicked side effects, often twisting the character in question
Possession of the One Ring in Tolkien's works seem to have granted a type of impure immortality. Gollum was very twisted, after having it for centuries, having originally been a hobbit, but he did live longer than a hobbit naturally could have. Bilbo didn't look old in LotR, but I recall him saying something like he felt stretched thin.


In any case, this is how I would categorize immortality in speclautive fiction, as in the two main subtypes at the top level, which can obviously be divided further into subtypes of their own.
Again, this is not meant for those who are experienced with the genres in question, but with novices who might, after having heard on how eternal life is unnatural when vampires were being discussed, ask how elves can have just that (I have met people who have understood the genre no better than that). This is not a double standard. It is this destinction.


* This excludes effects that could be considered unavoidable consequences of longevity itself, such as boredom or perhaps even the sorrow of living in ages with non-immortal friends and family gone.

** I put "everything" in quotation mark here, because clearly by context, this does most definitely NOT mean to include the pure immortality.


TL; DR
Whether a character or being's immortality is pure (or acceptable and natural, according to the works and its protagonists) will generally depend on whether the source behind the immortality is pure, and will often determine whether it cones without a price.


What do you think of my theory on immortality in fiction? Is it a valid way of splitting it? Should I add something, or remove something?

Think of this as me wanting feedback from my peers.

Thanks in advance!

 

[nightdreamer]

I have thought about that same dichotomy on occasion and decided that certainly some forms of immortality are more desirable than others. Of the "impure" type I think first of poor Borusa's fate in the Doctor Who serial "The Five Doctors", where he became conscious but immobile addition to Rassilon's tomb. Similarly, an episode of some series here in the States, a doctor had invented an immortality serum that made it impossible to die. The townsfolk got fed up with it all, injected him with his own serum, and buried him in the wet concrete that was to be the base of a statue.

Certainly, unenviable forms of immortality.

But I've thought more about what we might call "genuine" vs. "illusory" immortality. We know what "genuine" means, but "illusory" refers to all those stories where someone has transferred his memories to a computer, or the Internet, or a robot, or whatever. Is that really immortality? More likely, that person is just plain dead and a new consciousness was created with a duplicate set of memories. How would you tell the difference? The same question arises with teleportation. What if the original is killed and the duplicate doesn't know he's someone else because all the original memories are intact? It has also come up in more general philosophy: how do we know that consciousness is actually continuous and that we don't "die" and get "reborn" several times a second, passing on only memories.

I played with this idea in my only published novel so far, in the context of both consciousness transfer and teleportation. But don't read it. At least not yet. Now that I have ISBNs, I'm going to unpublish it, proof it again, and publish it right.

 

[BetaWolf]

I thought about these ideas, too. The two-point scale does work for me.

If it is a technological solution, consciousness gets rather complicated, as nightdreamer pointed out. For me, there is one 'master copy' of yourself, that includes an unbroken record of your thoughts and feelings and experiences. For say mind uploading to work, you would have to be continuously conscious of the experience.

Writing about cloning is one way to do this, and I thought that it would be a bigger issue in the latest Star Wars stuff, where you have an entire army of clones originating from one man's DNA. Some sci fi stories end up with the MC being the clone after all (there's a decent Arnold S. film about this--name escapes me).

But the issue of immortality--so much going on there. One practical issue is are you alone in it? The film Bicentennial Man (not a commercial success but good sci fi) based on Asimov's story deals with this issue. So if you do not age or diminish but everyone else does . . . well, is it worth it? Even if it is on the 'positive' side of the immortality spectrum.

Another one is childbearing and the family. If you are a female with a life expectancy of a few millennia, are you having a child every 3-5 years? Does menopause hit about age 45 or age 4,500? It also screws around with normal ideas of inheritance: if your father the king lives for 10,000 years, and you're the second-born, it might be a long wait. Then again, maybe these issues don't matter so much to near-immortals.

 

[nightdreamer]

For say mind uploading to work, you would have to be continuously conscious of the experience.

Interesting that you said that, because in the aforementioned novel, Hylly (the one who had her consciousness transferred) believes she is really herself because she remembers being in both places at once during the transfer. If you had to be rendered unconscious for the process, I supposed you'd be wondering for the rest of your (or whoever's) life.

But, alas! That's a spoiler!

 

[BetaWolf]

That's a pretty sticky issue. I once outlined a story where each of a dozen extrasolar colonies had clones of the same five hundred people. Each copy had the same memories and skills but thought itself unique. FTL travel was not forthcoming at the time, and when it did, there were some odd paradoxes to say the least, once half a dozen agricultural engineers from Dayton, Ohio, named John Baker came into contact with each other.

 

[nightdreamer]

Wow! I lived in Dayton, Ohio, for 15-20 years, and never met John Baker!

 

[BetaWolf]

I've never been to Ohio. Always been a Southern boy myself. Not sure why I picked that name or place.

 

[hopewrites]

Just to clarify you are making a distinction on the morality of the immortals origin of immortality, not making distinction on the morality of what the immortal does with their immortality?

Because I would say that its moralizing on what an immortal does with their mortality that leads the inexperienced to find double standards where there wouldn't be. Good Vampires, Fallen Angels, and the like.

 

[Darth Angelus]

Just to clarify you are making a distinction on the morality of the immortals origin of immortality, not making distinction on the morality of what the immortal does with their immortality?

Because I would say that its moralizing on what an immortal does with their mortality that leads the inexperienced to find double standards where there wouldn't be. Good Vampires, Fallen Angels, and the like.

Yes, that is basically it. This is about nature of the immortality itself (and its source/origin).

I didn't use the word "morality" about the immortality because it implies a certain amount of ambiguity and subjectivity (at least in a somewhat tolerant society). When I say pure vs. impure, it is so strongly related to the concept of moral vs. immoral that the two dichotomies are for all intents and purposes the same, except that this is usually more clear-cut or black and white. The immortality of a good vampire is still impure in its nature (any undead kind basically always is, by definition), and the immortality of a fallen angel is still pure.

 

[Verse]

Well, TVTropes has a lot to say about the matter (as usual):

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Immortality

In some stories, the immortals eventually develop fatal Ennui and give up, die, merge with the hive mind (Peter F. Hamilton has used this).

In others, in order to live forever, they become mindless or, at least so alien as to be unrecognisable as once human. This is often in the case where immortality requires the murder/sacrifice of others (soul drinkers type).