The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [142]
I could imagine exactly what Emily would have said to that—and so, I presume, could Lua Tawana, who announced when she visited Neyu to celebrate her fortieth birthday that she had decided to leave Earth. She had secured a job on the moon, but her ultimate aim was to go to Titan and make that her home for a century or two.
“It’s where the future is,” she told us, “and where the real movers and shakers are. If I’m to take an active part in making the future, that’s where I have to be. Here, I could only help to build another continent just like all the rest. There, I can help to build a world like none that has ever been seen or imagined before. And after Titan, who knows?”
SEVENTY-ONE
The ninth volume of the History of Death, entitled The Honeymoon of Emortality, was launched on 28 October 2975. The knot of supportive data was slight by comparison with its predecessors, but the accompanying commentary was extensive—which led many academic reviewers to lament the fact that I had given up “real history” in favor of “popular journalism.” Even those who were sympathetic suggested that I had begun to rush my work, although those who remembered that it had originally been planned as a seven-volume work were not slow to assert that the contrary was the case and that I was procrastinating because I had become afraid of the letdown effect of finishing it.
The main focus of the commentary was the development of attitudes to longevity and potential emortality following the establishment of the principle that every human child has a right to be born emortal. The reason that it was more lightly supported than any of its predecessors was simply that it needed less support. I still believe that it was unnecessary to make a fetish of gathering every last public statement ever made on the subject into a single knot, let alone that I should have made far more effort to trawl private archives for relevant comments.
The central stream of my argument dutifully weighed the significance of the belated extinction of the “nuclear” family and gave careful consideration to the backlash generated by the ideological rebellion of the Humanists, whose quest to preserve “the authentic Homo sapiens” had once led many to retreat to islands that the Continental Engineers were now integrating into their “new continent.” I was, however, more interested in less inevitable social processes and subtler reactions. I felt—and still feel—that I had more interesting observations to make on the spread of such new philosophies of life as neo-Stoicism, neo-Epicureanism, and Xenophilia.
My main task, as I saw it, was to place these oft-discussed matters in their proper context: the spectrum of inherited attitudes, myths, and fictions by means of which mankind had for thousands of years wistfully contemplated the possibility of extended life.
In fulfilling this task, I contended that traditional attitudes to the idea of emortality—including the common reactionary notion that people would inevitably find emortality intolerably tedious—were essentially an expression of “sour grapes.” While people thought that emortality was impossible, I pointed out, it made perfect sense for them to invent reasons why it would be undesirable anyhow, but when it became a reality, the imaginative battle had to be fought in earnest. The burden of these cultivated anxieties had to be shed, and a new mythology formulated—but that process had been painfully slow. The gradual transformation of the “eternal tedium” hypothesis into the “robotization” hypothesis represented direly slow progress.
My commentary flatly refused to give any substantial credit to the fears of those mortal men who felt that the advent of emortality might be a bad thing. I was as dismissive of the Robot Assassins and the original Thanaticists as I was of the Humanists.