Guest Post: Some Thoughts on Immortality by Keith West

When I was in graduate school, one of my favorite television shows was Highlander.  I’d seen the first and second movies, and while I’d enjoyed them, it was the TV show that really captured my imagination and made me think about immortals and immortality. A movie is limited to approximately two hours. By contrast, a weekly show has a lot more time to develop characters, backstory, plots and subplots, and story-arcs that can last for months or even years.

For those who may not be familiar with the premise of either the movies or the show, there is a mostly secret group of immortals running around with swords trying to chop each other’s heads off. Or at least some of them are. Called a quickening, it was how they increased in power. When one immortal decapitates another, there would be lightning and noise and all kinds of cool special effects. The survivor would jerk and spasm as the lightning would hit him.  Or her, in some cases, although most of the immortals on the show were male.

The central character of the show was Duncan McCloud (of the Clan McCloud), played by Adrian Paul. He was one of the good immortals, and he was mentoring a young man named Richie, who turned out to be immortal himself. Only Richie didn’t know he was immortal, at least not until the end of the first season, when he died a violent death, only to find himself alive a few minutes later.

Immortals didn’t realize they were immortal until something happened to them that would kill an ordinary human. After that, they could survive all kinds of injuries.

All of which I found extremely cool, but that wasn’t what caught my imagination.  It was the way Duncan’s backstory was handled in the series format.

Duncan McCloud was three or four hundred years old. It’s been long enough that I don’t recall exactly.  Each episode would have several flashbacks connecting an episode of his past with something going on in the present. Sometimes it was the return of an old friend. Or an old enemy, although there weren’t too many of those around. Encounters between immortals who didn’t get along had a tendency to end in fireworks. Sometimes it was something that triggered an emotional response to an event from decades or even centuries prior. I recall one episode where Duncan commented that the hurt of a lover’s betrayal was still as painful as it had been when it occurred in the early 1800s.

All of this got me to thinking.

What would it be like to live for centuries, never aging while those around me got old and died? Would I want to marry? Duncan had a girlfriend for part of the series run, although her character decided she couldn’t take the stress of living with a man who could literally lose his head at any time.

How would an immortal handle the changes in society and culture that he (or she) would witness?  Maybe I’m getting old, but I’m seeing some definite differences between me and the college students I teach. Their outlooks aren’t always my outlooks. I suspect this trend is only going to accelerate as I get older.

How would an immortal adapt to changing technologies?  Would he be an early adapter, or a Luddite?  How would an immortal hide his immortality?  What about languages?  Slang and even basic vocabulary are fluid. Would an immortal always speak in an old-fashioned way? Or would she know all the latest terms of contemporary slang?

These are some of the questions I thought about while the show was airing.  They are questions I still think about.

There’s really no answer to these questions. Or rather there’s an infinity of answers.  Each writer is different, just like each person is different.  And as each immortal would be different, if they existed.

Fantasy and science fiction allows those of us who write to examine those questions and their myriad of answers to them. We can consider immortality granted through genetic engineering, casting spells, or any other mechanism a writer can imagine. I’ve not had an opportunity to read any of the stories in Death’s Sting besides my own. But I’m looking forward to them. I’d like to see how some other writers answer these questions I’ve posed above.

Keith West (http://www.adventuresfantastic.com/) has been a fan of the science fiction, fantasy, mystery, horror, and historical adventure genres for more years than he’s willing to admit. By day he teaches impressionable young people his bad habits (of which there are many) and by night he tells lies for fun and profit (more fun than profit). He commits dayjobbery in the field of Physics where in addition to teaching he occasionally writes cross-genre documents known as grant proposals, consisting of science fiction (the proposal), fantasy (the budget), and horror (the reviewers’ comments). He and his wife make their home in West Texas with their son (adopted from Kazakhstan) and two dogs (adopted from the animal shelter). He denies having an addiction to using parentheses.