Immortality, Inc.

"The scientific hereafter hadn't freed men from the fear of death, as it should have done. On the contrary, it had intensified their uncertainties and stimulated their competitive drive. Given the surety of an afterlife, man wanted to improve upon it, to enjoy a better heaven than anyone else."

 

I picked up my first Robert Sheckley short story collection at a book stand in a mountain resort town on the sort of occasion which boosts book sales in resort towns: a rainy day. It was one of those old-school 20th-century SciFi publications which just slapped some randomly commissioned stock image on the cover, in this case a gaggle of nondescript, toothy monstrosities looming at the reader, presumably because one of the stories included was titled "The Monsters" but as I was eleven years old and my grandmother and great-aunt not particularly well-versed in the Fi of Sci, our ad-hoc literary club deemed it a worthy enough purchase.

... and amazingly enough, it was!

Since then I've wondered time and again at how little mention Sheckley gets these days among the wider public, given his obvious influence among his peers. Maybe it's because he was a bit of a writer's writer, his stories always laced with self-conscious reversals or parodies of storytelling conventions. Maybe because he never stuck to a particular subgenre long enough to build himself a brand image, see-sawing between little green men, time travel, telepathy, space tech phlebotina or psychedelic fantasies at his whim.

In that sense, 1959's Immortality, Inc. has probably remained his most popular work because for most of its length it plays like a traditional 'everyman visits utopia' plot. Instead of blindsiding you with, say, a little green man in desperate need of exfoliant or 'in space kitchen, food eats you' the author provides a mediocre, relatable schmoe through whose eyes the audience can visit a glorious future in which the afterlife has been proven to exist. Spoiler alert: it ain't all it's cracked up to be... but humanity persists nonetheless, wheeling and dealing, controlling and rebelling in intrinsic patterns only modulated by new technology. The world continues to be what it is and the protagonist's narrative resolves neither by saving nor condemning it but merely seeing his personal conflicts through. Like Lem's Return from the Stars, this is more a novel about personal adaptability than dystopian social commentary. Even the science-zombies and science-ghosts are human, all too human.

However Immortality Inc.'s cultural impact might be better gauged by a case study. While Futurama parodied many SciFi subgenres and set pieces during its run(s) it owed quite a bit of its first few episodes' material to this book, from Fry recklessly deciding to go slumming in a deceptively familiar city and almost getting harvested, to one very memorable piece of futuristic machinery:

"Then he turned and entered the Suicide Booth, and closed the door behind him.

There were no windows, no furniture except a single chair. The instructions posted on one wall were very simple. You just sat down and, at your leisure, closed the switch upon the right arm."

 

While other plot devices like the abhumans (zombies in this case) grudgingly tolerated to live in the sewers are harder to pin directly to Sheckley's influence, one line in particular set me laughing aloud upon re-reading the book recently:

 

"I've been a junior yacht designer three times in two lifetimes."

"I'm a delivery boy!"

 

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P.S.: With lines like "For his body's limitations, far more than its capabilities, seemed to express his own particular essence" I have to reiterate Sheckley's incidental relevance to roleplaying games in particular. His awareness of the medium often forces his characters to decide how to play a role they've been assigned.