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.

In the Dope Show

"The drugs, they say, are made in California

We love your face, we'd really like to sell you"

 

Marilyn Manson - The Dope Show

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"Many of the great economic masters, though they had originally favored radio-bliss in moderation as an opiate for the discontented workers, now turned against it. Their craving was for power; and for power they needed slaves whose labor they could command for their great industrial ventures. They therefore devised an instrument which was at once an opiate and a spur."

 

Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker (1937)

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"The sensories were an inescapable part of 2110, as omnipresent and popular as television had been in Blaine's day. Larger and more elaborate versions of the sensories were used for theater productions, and variations were employed for advertising and propaganda. They were to date the purest and most powerful form of the ready-made dream, tailored to fit anyone.

But they had their extremely vocal opponents, who deplored the ominous trend toward complete passivity in the spectator. These critics were disturbed by the excessive ease with which a person could assimilate a sensory; and in truth, many a housewife walked blank-eyed through her days, a modern-day mystic plugged into a continual bright vision.

In reading a book or watching television, the critics pointed out, the viewer had to exert himself, to participate. But the sensories merely swept over you, vivid, brilliant, insidious, and left behind the damaging  schizophrenic impression that dreams were better and more desirable than life.

[...]

In another generation, the critics thundered, people will be incapable of reading, thinking or acting!

It was a strong argument. But Blaine, with his 152 years of perspective, remembered much the same sort of arguments hurled at radio, movies, comic books, television and paperbacks. Even the revered novel had once been bitterly chastised for its deviation from the standards of pure poetry. Every innovation seemed culturally destructive; and became, ultimately, a cultural staple, the embodiment of the good old days, the spirit of the Golden Age -- to be threatened and finally destroyed by the next innovation."

 

Robert Sheckley - Immortality, Inc. (1959)

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Video games have been outputting more of an artsy fringe lately, but have yet to truly mature as a creative medium. Then again, how long did television take to outgrow the laugh track? Meh, games've got time. Still, re-reading Immortality, Inc. makes me wonder what Sheckley must've thought of the advent of video games by his death in 2005. Standard railing against new media used to revisit the same premise that increasing media sophistication brought audience apathy: the more work done by the program, the less done by the programmed, and thus new media will collapse civilization. When video games came along, the pretext to angst was flipped around faster than Procrustes could make his bed. They prompt too much action, hyperactivity, over-involvement, and THUS this new medium will collapse civilization.

Civilization having... sec (runs to glance out the window; nope, still there)

Civilization having neglected to collapse, we're left with the unsurprising conclusion that games are just another creative medium, amenable to personal or artistic expression, entertainment or propaganda in whatever ratios the monkeys in question produce and consume. Just like books, theater or television, some (like myself) in every generation will be prone to over-indulge by various standards, but as with every diversion the prevalence of indulgence is less an issue in itself than an indicator of the inadequacy of human life.

Engaging my superhuman powers of forevoyeurism for a moment, I can predict that media, genres and fads will continue to arise now and anon, and the relevant question each time will not be of the new mode's quality, but the quality of its creators and audiences. All the more relevant this to our slightly decentralized modern culture, with gamified public discourse encouraging us to score points against each other on every forum and comments section. The depth and complexity of a video game, more than that of a book or movie, depends not only on a target audience's ability to spot depth and complexity but its ability to behave deeply and complexly. Does your grand role-playing adventure consist of being ordered from HUD marker to HUD marker? Is your strategy just a race to the designated best unit? Is your city an endless reiteration of the same cookie-cutter neighbourhood?

 

Does your identity as an imaginary Werwolfe hold any meaning or are you just another werewolf? Games do hold one great, largely untapped potential to alter our thinking: establishing a personal playstyle, mode of interaction, be it expressed in simoleon expenditure, unit ratios or alignment wheel position... or preferences, or fears or aspirations. It gets you thinking about deliberately making your soul. Who were you in 2021, and who will you be in 2022? Have any words, sights, sounds altered your personality? With or without your informed consent? Are you moving or being moved? In our grand, global, interconnected all-pawn clash of psychological influences, are you a player or just another unit?

Mindswap

"Where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies
Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers
That grow so incredibly high"

The Beatles - Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

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Spoilers for the book in question follow. Long story short: if you're into Role-Playing Games, you should suffer through this moderately entertaining abortion of a narrative.
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You've probably never heard of Robert Sheckley despite his half-century career and enviable doses of both talent and publication... at least from where I'm standing as a tongue-twisted blogger with five minus a half readers. He was quite adept in science fiction's prime modus operandi: quick, biting short stories centering on a particular effect, conserving more detail than they provide. Unfortunately for him, short stories rarely become famous enough to be remembered individually or lend their author name recognition by association. And, fortune aside, he also seems to have occasionally fallen into the habit of shitting where he ate.

The novel Mindswap came out in the mid-'60s when dropping acid was assumed to somehow unlock the secrets of the cosmos and deconstructionism was just ramping up from a moderately legitimate critique of communication's ability to twist concepts to the all-purpose anti-intellectual vandalism we know and love today. (In fact, Sheckley was both born and died within a couple of years of Jacques Derrida.) The book starts out intriguing enough. A small-town lad yearns for adventure, but as he can't afford to physically travel by spaceship he opts for swapping minds with a Martian, only to find himself defrauded of his human body and unable to return. From there, he swaps to another alien body hunting for talking eggs, and then to another alien too polite to refuse the gift of an exploding nose-ring. That takes us about halfway through the relatively short novel. Most of the second half is masterfully-wordsmithed crap.

"Marvin stared at this man transformed; then bowed low and exclaimed. 'Milord Inglenook bar na Idrisi-san, first lord of the Admiralty, Familiar to the Prime Minister, Adviser Extraordinary to the King, Bludgeon of the Church Rampant and Invocateur of the Grand Council!'
'I am that person,' Inglenook responded. 'And I play the hunchback for reasons most politic; for were my presence even suspected here by my rival, Lord Blackamoor de Mordevund, all of us would be dead men ere the frogs in the Pond Royal had chance to croak at first ray of Phoebus!'"

The hero Marvin's brain, overloaded with novelty, succumbs to "metaphoric deformation" and begins seeing all the aliens around him as humans engaged in stereotypical pulp adventures, from a risque pickup bar / brothel scene to a wild west romance, to an amusingly detailed pastiche of Alexandre Dumas and his many ghostwriters and imitators in later centuries' historical swashbuckling throwbacks. Or it would be amusing if that paragraph above weren't tortured and disarticulated into several dozen pages' worth of more of the same to pad out the book's length.

It bears mentioning that SciFi during the early and middle 20th century languished in the grip of pulp appeal, churning out piles upon piles of interchangeable swashbuckling pistoleer space pirate space rebel space commodore space-girl-getting space heroes like Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, James T. Kirk or Luke Skywalker. If Sheckley wanted to highlight the shameful lack of creativity in copying such cliches century after century, he certainly succeeded. However:

1) That point could have been made in five pages just as easily as fifty.
2) Other authors of the time did it more elegantly (e.g. Robert Heinlein in Space Family Stone's asides about writing for a pulp SF TV series)
3) Sheckley himself was well on the way to demonstrating a better take on the hero's journey in Mindswap... before instead opting to merely posture as a literary rebel.

There is still one demographic for whom Mindswap should be considered required reading: roleplayers, whether you just play cRPGs like me or you actually get together around a table or you nerf each other in the park, or especially if you nurture ambitions of GMing or even writing material for such settings. Mindswap's ending takes escapist "immersion" to its logical self-defeating extreme. It provides apt examples of quick and illustrative world-building even while parodying formulaic adventure-worlds. Perhaps most importantly, this term should be remembered in any discussion of speculative fiction:

"'No,' Marvin said. 'Why is it called "Panzaism"?'
'The concept is self-explanatory,' Blanders said. 'Don Quijote thinks the windmill is a giant, whereas Panza thinks the giant is a windmill. Quijotism may be defined as the perception of everyday things as rare entities. The reverse of that is Panzaism, which is the perception of rare entities as everyday things.'
'Do you mean,' Marvin asked, 'that I might think I was looking at a cow, when actually it was an Altairian?'"

If your Altairians act like cows, then you should be writing cow fiction, not SF. We should all gain the cynicism necessary to spot the myriad hacks who fail to follow through the logical consequences of their futuristic or fantastic set pieces, who drag wonder into mundane muck.