Echoes of Ambrose

Executive summary: Immortality, Inc., Sheckley’s first novel, is a fast-moving tour of wonders and horrors, well worth reading, even if its individual parts are greater than the novel as a whole.

The novel goes by a number of different names. It originally appeared as a Galaxy serial (Oct. 1958-Feb. 1959). Then-editor Horace Gold never saw a title he didn’t want to change, so that version was called (as you see above) Time Killer.

Another version (abridged without Sheckley’s approval) appeared as Immortality Delivered (Avalon, Dec 1958—before the Galaxy serial was completed). This was soon followed by an unabridged version from Bantam with the title Immortality, Inc. That title, presumably Sheckley’s preferred one, was stable over succeeding editions. (Here’s hoping the text was, too.) The movie was filmed (badly, it would seem) as Freejack (1992).

I first read the book in the early 90s in the undistinguished tie-in version, which I’ve somehow retained over the decades when more beautiful and/or valued books have been lost by the wayside. I reread it this time in the NESFA collection Dimensions of Sheckley which I strongly recommend (along with its companion volume The Mask of Mañana, an omnibus of Sheckley’s short fiction).

The distance in time and space between my two reads of this book was so great that it was almost like reading the novel for the first time. I remembered nothing of the characters or the plot. But after I was fairly deep into the book, its central fantastic idea began to ring a bell with me.

And, to be honest, the plot and characters are not very memorable. The hero, whose name I had to look up to write this paragraph, is a guy named Thomas Blaine. He’s a fairly well-off white guy, living in and around New York City in 1958. His job is that of junior yacht designer at a well-respected firm. Anyway, that’s his job title. Other people do the creative work; he draws deck plans, deals with promotions and advertising and liaisons with other firms. It’s an unextraordinary life, as he is well aware, but it satisfies him well enough, and then he dies. This happens on page 1.

Blaine wakes up in someone else’s body in 2140. He has some trouble getting settled in the 22nd century (I’ll go into that in a minute), but he eventually gets the job of office boy in a yacht designing firm. He’s so good at the office work that he gets promoted to junior yacht designer; the premise is that he’ll do the design work if somebody comes in wanting an antique 20th-century-style yacht. That doesn’t actually happen much, so he mostly draws deck plans, and deals with promotions and advertising and liaisons with other firms. Eventually he has to flee to the other side of the world to save his (?) life and ends up in Nuku Hiva. He takes a job as Master Boatwright at a boatyard. It’s interesting work and he takes to it well. But after he writes a few promotions that bring the yard more business, he starts to spend more time in the office; he deals with promotions and advertising and liaisons with other firms.

Maybe you see why it’s hard to remember the guy. With three completely different shots at life in two different centuries and two different bodies, he always ends up with the same old life. It would be different if he had some sort of fierce calling that burned its imprint into every path he chooses, but he’s just a guy who drifts along via the path of least resistance. Other characters are even less vividly drawn.

It might seem as if I’m grinding an axe to decapitate this book, but I really just want to get the duller stuff out of the way and get into the good stuff.

The fantastical idea at the core of the novel, and the way Sheckley explores it, is the best thing about the book. This idea is that the mind is detachable from the body. Given the proper highly scientific technology (not magic—that is right out), the mind can be extracted from its original body and inserted like a floppy disk (ask your grandparents, kids) into someone else’s body; in yet another process, a mind can be strengthened so that it can exist without a body at all. Decades of mental and spiritual discipline can achieve the same end (we’re looking at you, Stoicism!) but in the 22nd century anyone can have this benefit of life after death—if they can afford to pay for it.

This implies the existence of a scientifically provable afterlife (not necessarily religious—but not necessarily not). Also ghosts, who can haunt you in a very real and disturbing fashion. It also implies werewolves (e.g. if somebody’s mind gets stuck inside a wolf). Likewise zombies: if somebody’s mind gets attached to a body that isn’t fully capable of sustaining life anymore. Also: a novel kind of travel, smuggling a mind from body to body until it reaches safety.

All of these things receive some attention in the book, and it’s fascinating to see the changes Sheckley rings on his idea. For instance: reincarnation and “hereafter insurance” are expensive—strictly for the upper classes. But if a rich old person wants to be reincarnated (i.e. have his mind shifted to) a healthy young body, they could pay a poor person to surrender their body in return for the assurance of an afterlife.

The fact that people can survive death has, in the story, a lot of implications, the most startling (and plot relevant) of which is this: murder isn’t always a crime. For instance, a rich person who was assured of an afterlife could go out in style by commissioning a hunt with a crew of professional assassins as the hunters and himself as victim. This idea of people being hunted by other people goes back, at least, to Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game”; Sheckley had treated it before in “The Seventh Victim” and would return to it again, but the version here is fitted to Sheckley’s notion of a proven afterlife. Blaine gets involved with a couple of these human hunts; in one of them he’s a hunter; in the other, he’s the quarry.

The plot is mostly an excuse to run Blaine through the horrors and wonders of his new century, and does a pretty good job of it. Blaine is snatched from the moment of his death into the future, courtesy of the Rex Corporation. It’s a stunt to prove they can do it, even though it’s arguably illegal. And, it turns out, corporate brass decide they’d rather not have done it: the head of the corporation axes the project and Blaine is out in the cold, trying to find his way through a world that has no place for him. His steps are being dogged by a zombie, for reasons that neither Blaine nor the zombie fully understand, but which make sense when Sheckley unveils them. Blaine is also haunted by ghosts, one friendly and one unfriendly, and the details of how you deal with ghosts (whether it be self-defense or just communication) are interesting and convincing, without ceasing to have a certain eeriness.

As a sword-and-sorcery writer I wanted more straight-up adventure. In particular, a fight with a werewolf or twelve would have brightened things up a bit. But Sheckley, alas, does not go there. Blaine’s journey through the underground city of zombies and his conflict with the malicious polyergeist who’s making his second life hell are some compensation for this.

For the 21st-century reader, a few things in the book were a little unsatisfying. The character you think is slated to be the hero’s girlfriend is, in fact, slated to be the hero’s girlfriend. There is one other woman in the plot; she and the hero also have sex. That’s why women appear in this story; otherwise the characters default to male. There’s a bit about the Chinese colonizing Mars. One character invites Blaine to a meal of Martian food, and Blaine is excited to try it, but it just turns out to be the same as the Chinese-American food Blaine already knows. That’s mildly amusing. But then the hero asks his host if “the Martians” also opened a lot of laundries, and is gratified that the answer is yes. Chinese exist to launder clothes and produce Chinese food, just as women exist for the hero to have sex with. Sheckley’s future world is haunted by mid-century ethnic and gender stereotypes. There’s not a lot of this, thank God, but the book would be better without any of it.

One has a sense that Sheckley is trying to say something about life and about human identity in this story. I’m not sure his grasp matches his reach, here, but the ambition propels him and his hero to some interesting places.

It could easily be 30-some years before I reread this book again (since I’m not planning on dying). But if and when I do, I expect I’ll enjoy it then, too.

Mirrored from Ambrose & Elsewhere.