Science fiction that presents immortality in a good light?
It seems incredibly common in works of science fiction that touch upon technological immortality to focus on every possible way that such a technology could go wrong, create problems, or worsen social dynamics.
Among the negative outcomes that have attained trope levels of frequency, off the top of my head, I can name the following:
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Immortality becomes available only to the ultra-wealthy, allowing them even more power to abuse everyone else, leading immortal people to be antagonists in a pretty generic dystopian plot.
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Immortality subtly twists the morality of its beneficiaries, causing them to lose sight of "the real meaning of life" according to the author's worldview, and the protagonist usually fights for society to recognize how important death and endings are
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Immortality causes people to go insane, become monsters, or otherwise utterly lose their humanity (this is more of an extreme version of case #2, but I feel it's distinct in the way a story plays out)
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Immortality ultimately leads to the extinction of the human species due either to biological effects of the immortality technology in question, or due to cultural/societal shifts that lead people to stop reproducing
I'm sure there are many others that I'd recall if prompted, but my point is that I don't think I can name any science fiction that involves immortality technology that doesn't also decry it as ultimately a harmful development.
Are there any works of science fiction that any of you can think of that do more to celebrate the idea or look forward to it with some optimism?
The hard-to-classify web original 17776 plays with the concept - although there is no reproduction and of course society changes in many ways as a result of achieving immortality. I don't think it's presented as either entirely good or entirely bad.
The story focuses on... uh, sentient machines and football. There is, for example, a football game which uses all of Nebraska as a field. It's a weird one.
Permutation City. Hard sci-fi, and exactly what you're asking.
Th Culture series seems to be a fairly positive take, though it’s very far-future.
Strictly speaking The Culture are not far future, it's mostly all happened already. The Culture was founded in about 8000BC and the earliest stories are set in the 13th century by our calender. They do drop by Earth in the 1970s, quietly, and we are due to get officially Contacted around 2100AD.
But you are still correct. It's far-future technology.
There are various things people can do to keep entertained. This one guy from SC turned himself into a kind of sentient shrub...
I think the idea is that you can do whatever you want, and if you're bored you can just freeze yourself.
The red Mars trilogy does this. It is not true immortality, but it is where humans start to live hundreds of years without a definite limit. It isn’t a main focus until the later books, and they are definitely a slog to get through. Even still, it does show an interesting and good world view of (pseudo-)immortality.
Maybe not quite what you are looking for, but Roger Zelazny wrote Isle of the Dead who's main character just happens to be basically immortal. Him being immortal isn't really the plot of the book, it's what he did with his long lived life, created worlds, which is the theme the book works upon.
The main character, Francis Sandow, is one of my favorite Zelazny characters, even though this book, to me, isn't one of his best (my fav is Creatures of Light and Darkness). Sandow's immortality came by random chance, and is not finite. He seems to enjoy it and there doesn't seem to be any negativity surrounding it. So it kind of fits the bill but not really since immortality isn't the thrust of the book, just character development.
One problem is that no matter what positives might come with it, in hard sci-fi, ultimately immortality can only be boring. Immortal beings will spend most of their time bored. Because the universe is expanding, eventually ever other particle will be over the immortal's personal event horizon and that's it for the rest of time. And that's a very, very long time, possibly infinite. So much time that all the fun bits of life are reduced to a mere flicker compared to the countless eons of utter loneliness.
Stephen Baxter deals a little with this in his Xeelee books, iirc the character of Michael Poole ends up immortal somehow, and basically goes insane.
Neal Asher's Polity universe contains the immortal Horace Blegg, who just sort of wanders around doing stuff. He seems mostly benevolent. Old Captains infected with the Spatterjay virus are also extremely long-lived to the point of being functionally immortal but that's not really explored as an issue (or otherwise) for them, that I recall.
Iain M Banks' Culture citizens are effectively immortal but it's rare they choose to live more than a few centuries, although they often elect not to die, just get put in suspended animation with some or other criteria for their revival. Usually interesting things happening.
The thing about speculative fiction, is that this is all speculation.
We frame our speculation about immortality from within a very complex mortal context (and we have no choice - it's the only context we know), but we really don't know what it could be like to live for such unimaginable spans. We have no idea.
Would we stop valuing the moment? We don't know.
Would we run out of interests, exhaust all possible pursuits, and tire of all possible hobbies? We don't know, but I don't think so.
There are so many things in motion that we don't have the capacity to fully consider - at the same time a person is mastering one subject, two new subjects may arise for future mastery. The rate of growth of "meaningful stuff to do" might be faster than the rate we exhaust our options.
And the idea that having more time makes each slice of time less meaningful is highly debatable. It sounds more like a platitude we imagine for ourselves in an attempt to convince each other that death isn't so bad. But maybe it really is the case. We can't know without experiencing it. My opinion is that we'd find that life would remain fresh.
And as far as the eventuality of the universe goes, it's beyond unreasonable, in my opinion, to assume that, given a million more years of science and thought, we won't find something out that makes that a nonissue. Maybe it's true that there is no hope for a meaningful eternity, but our speculation is woefully inadequate to say that with any certainty at this point in history.
Which is why I enjoy speculation that goes in more than one direction. And some speculative fiction that attempted to grasp all the good things about living for an extremely long time would be welcome to me, or even just some fiction that presented it as a mixed bag, instead of a purely bad idea.
Eh, you're up against thermodynamics and that's a pretty hard no. If we're wrong about thermodynamics we're wrong about almost everything. We'd have to pull some weird Diaspora like stuff and while that's fine, you're talking about other universes at that point and then you can just magic whatever you like. Which is totally OK, I love that kind of stuff too. But on an infinite timescale, statistically nothing happens. That's the problem.
I can think of several authors (Egan is one, in Diaspora; M Banks's Minds are another) who have their immortals remain interested in stuff. Usually weird or large-scale - or both - research or construction projects. Occasionally art. Which seems reasonable, that's what I'd get into if I had forever. But the general sense, at least in the sci-fi I read, is that ultra-long-lived - or ultra time-compressed, same same - entities generally seem to end up bored or of varying degrees of incomprehensibly insane.
I don't think it's unreasonable to think there's a limited amount of knowledge available. Information theory says there is a limited amount of information one universe can store, which means that at the macro-level the universe is theoretically fully knowable. At least physically. At the quantum level it's boringly unpredictable. Watching the So once you've exhausted discovering the physical laws, then you have to solve philosophy and sheer experience would likely do that. After a billion years you've been in every possible ethical position thousands of times. I suspect that with enough time you can brute-force philosophy (and I say that as someone who studied it at university).
So no, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that immortals would get bored with this universe. Rather the opposite, I think it's the only rational position to take. Maybe another one with different physical laws would be interesting. Maybe running real-level simulations to try every possible thing would remain interesting. But the general idea that immortality is boring seems the most reasonable assumption, which is perhaps why it's such a pervasive idea. At lower tech levels, that immortality is only for the rich and that immortals would act in a greedy and self-interested way seems equally reasonable. We've seen how shitty humans are to each other in scarcity situations and limited immortality is a sign of a scarcity civilisation.
The problem is you're talking about infinity. When you start to do that the scales
changebreak. Everything breaks in infinite time, and Any thing which is interesting has to remain such over infinite time and infinity is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it takes a long time to walk down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to infinity.So this is a little off topic but I hate that term. The thing about fiction is that it's all speculation. If it wasn't speculative it would be a documentary. It's sci-fi or it's fantasy or it's any one of loads of other genres. Sci-fi is a very specific kind of speculation, because the known rules of science (mostly - FTL is often a freebie) still apply.
That term exists because Margaret Atwood thinks she's too good to write sci-fi so she started calling it speculative fiction. She is not too good to write sci-fi because sci-fi is a legitimate form of literature.
The bored angle doesn't hold up to real scrutiny in my view. You're only bored if you never forget anything. Even a superhuman AGI is going to have a reason to forget things - efficiency demands you don't keep it all in the hot memory, you put some things in cold storage. If you can forget, then when you haven't gone skiing in six thousand years it'll still feel like new - and there are probably hundreds of planets to choose from for your ski vacation that weren't even options for the last trip.
Forgetfulness has to exist at a point that allows you to forget things and re-experience them again. Nobody talks about this much in scifi, they gloss right over the idea that there's a 'maximum working set' for memory.
That set can get pretty big though, and be extended in other ways. Let's say you're genuinely bored. Just dump all the memories into storage and be reborn as a new person, to whatever degree you like. Keep the personality, or dump it and start from an even more basic reboot. Then later on you can always go back and look at the memories of past lives. What's more fun than doing something for the first time? Try doing it for the first time over dozens of lives, and then put those all together.
Being able to forget might be enough to make eternity bearable.
iirc, memory editing in long-lived entities is a thing in quite a lot of universes. Alistair Reynolds does it in House of Suns, I think. Iain M Banks talks about it on several occasions - both for AI and human-analogue squishy brains. His AI tiered storage stuff is quite interesting, and requires multidimensional storage (making it effectively infinite). I wish Banks had had a chance to go into Infinite Fun Space (the virtual environments his AI's entertain themselves in) in some more detail because it sounds fascinating.
There is a question about identity if you keep wiping your memories. Can you "keep the personality" and ditch all the events? Is personality not formed by life events? If you go for a full mind wipe (or offload to storage and reintegrate later) are you even you by then? When you integrate a few centuries of re-doing the same thing over and over is that not perhaps horribly depressing? Sure, you learned to ski a thousand different times but the end result was the same and surely you'd come to the realisation that you're only re-doing it because in a last-ditch attempt to stave off boredom? There's a game I like called "Defense Grid" and every so often I delete my save and replay it from the start and it's slightly less fun every time. Even if you couldn't remember at the time, that would all come crashing in when you reintegrated previous memeoires.
BUT (that's a big but) - in a sense that doesn't matter. The time in which matter exists and things like skiing can happen is to all intents and purposes zero length when you're talking about eternity. Almost all of time will be post heat-death, when it doesn't matter what you can remember or not, nothing happens and nothing can happen. You probably can't tech your way out of the universe becoming nothing but black holes and emptiness.
Immortal means infinite and infinity renders the finite to nothing.
I'm pretty well-versed in thermodynamics, having a physics degree and all, and yes, given our current understanding of the known, local universe and it's laws, that's a problem.
But we've only been researching physics for a few centuries (in a meaningful way - Greek philosophy really doesn't count). We don't have to be wrong about thermodynamics in order for there to be a non-negative answer to Aasimov's Last Question given another thousand or ten thousand years of science. It's not as much about rewriting the laws we've discovered so far as much as it is about potentially sidestepping them, I think.
Or, if none of that pans out, there seem to be other options. Imagine that, for example, the way we immortalize ourselves is through some sort of mind-uploading that results in our being able to think and experience things at a much faster time scale. That would effectively "buy time" in the case that the billions or trillions of years we have at our mortal cognitive time scale is ever worryingly short. Even stuff like that, while not a solution, per se, makes a pretty big difference. I don't know, there are just so many things we still haven't thought of yet.
It's generous to say our understanding of what our long-term options are is even in its infancy.
I'm a bit curious why we always phrase it as being 'right' or 'wrong' about thermodynamics. We know we're right, up to a point at least, based on a gargantuan collection of evidence. When we contemplate something that appears to be violating thermodynamics - like for example the spectrum of UAPs we're seeing lately - it's better to assume they are satisfying thermodynamics in a way we don't yet understand. If their thermodynamically closed system extends into dimensions we haven't encountered, for example, it could appear to perform magic, because the accounting we expect to see is taking place in a region of the universe we haven't detected or studied yet.
Thermodynamics is probably bigger than we think it is. :)
The Great ship by Robert Reed is a collection of short stories all set in the same universe. Humans are more or less immortal but I don't think it was ever cast as some sort of harmful thing. A lot of the time, it's just used as a part of the story, without really making any grand statements about it. It's just how humans are. There are certainly changes in some people and the culture due to being immortal but I don't think Reed is casting any judgments. If anything, it feels more like an exploration.
It has been a bit since I read it, so pardon if my interpretation is off. But a lot of Reed's work is set in the Great ship universe and are consistently really good!
Its not a book, per se, but Id check out the schlock mercenary webcomic. A big part of the larger arc is the achievement of functional immortality, and what ultra-mature civilizations do with themselves.
The problem is immortality eventually is going to get - not meaning to pun - really old. Every single person you meet you will be alive when they die. While it could be fun for a few hundred years, eventually things would just get very boring.
There is wealth disparity in Peter F Hamilton's Commonwealth (especially early on), but the immortals are usually portrayed as benevolent rather than antagonistic (so is AI for that matter). Everyone seems pretty happy existing for a very long time, often doing weird stuff like cloning themselves, uploading themselves to the internet or turning themselves into hiveminds, but the stories are usually interesting. It's mainly a future of expansion into space and encountering alien species. He's good at writing antagonistic aliens who are entirely unlike us.
IIRC there are 7 books in this universe (2+3+2). The author also has other books with distinct settings.