Top 16 Books About Immortality Updated 04 /2024

A long life is more important than love and money. When it comes to true immortality (or even super-long lives), there are bound to be a lot of unexpected consequences, and no good story can be summarized in a single sentence. Everyone was happy because they got what they wanted and it all worked out well.

Holy Fire

by Bruce Sterling – 1996

This isn't the first time author Bruce Sterling has written a book that doesn't have a lot of action, but it can be hard for sci-fi fans who just want a good laser fight.

She is 94 years old at the end of the 21st century. She is in charge of the world's "post-human" gerontocracy. Life-extension technology is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. Mia, like many older people, has spent all of her money and time to qualify for new and experimental rejuvenation techniques. The most extreme procedure Mia has ever had has made her look like she's 20 years old, but she's also on the edge of being crazy.

When it comes to cyberpunk books from the 1990s, Holy Fire is one of the more literary ones.

It was "brilliant," "fascinating," "exciting," and "a full set of thrills."

A review of science fiction in the New York Review of Books

The Eden Cycle

by Raymond Z. Gallun – 1974

There are a lot of people who think Raymond Z. Gallun wrote the best pulp sci-fi books from the 1930s through the 1950s: The Eden Cycle is thought to be his best work.

The Eden Cycle is like a mix of Contact and The Matrix, but it came out years before both movies. It's about humans who have been given immortality and the ability to live in different eras of history through virtual reality, but they become less and less able to respond to their experiences.

Welcome, Chaos

by Kate Wilhelm – 1983

People who aren't happy with their jobs usually like photography and nature study. Lyle Taney is one of them. Afterwards, Taney gets into trouble with scientists who have an immortality elixir thanks to a mysterious undercover agent named Hugh Lasater.

Welcome, Chaos is a lot more detailed about landscapes and how people think about themselves than most sci-fi. Prepare for a gentle river cruise instead of a whirlpool of action-packed rapids.

"A very good and thought-provoking book."

Journal of the School Library

To Live Forever

by Jack Vance – 1956

As one of the first sci-fi novels to break away from the space opera stories that were popular at the time, To Live Forever was one of the first to do that. It's smart, but it might be a little slow for someone who wants to read about spaceships exploding.

How long did Garven Waylock want the scandal about him being immortal to go away? So that he could once again join the ranks of those who lived forever, he had kept his identity secret for a while. Then he met a certain girl who had the power to mess up his present, and maybe his whole life.

Diaspora

by Greg Egan – 1997

A very small number of people live on Earth in the 30th century. Most people have put themselves into robot bodies or solar-system-spanning virtual worlds to avoid death. That is, until the collision of two nearby neutron stars threatens life in every form.

Greg Egan, the author of the book, is often called a genius. You'll get some interesting ideas from the book, but you might not get the strong drama of stories by other authors.

Fans of hard science fiction that includes high-level math and interesting ideas about how the world might change in the future are sure to be excited by Egan's ideas.

Magazine: -Publishers Weekly

The Hollow Lands

by Michael Moorcock – 1974

My favorite sci-fi book right now is this one. That's not the only thing that reviewers often say about The Hollow Lands. They also use words like "silly," "ridiculous," "delirious," and "romantic." Dancers at the End of Time: The Second Book After narrowly avoiding death in London in the 1800s, Jherek is separated from his love for many centuries. So he starts a new, fast-moving campaign to get back together with Mrs. Underwood, no matter how risky or risky it is.

The World of Null-A

by A. E. van Vogt – 1945

In the 1940s, A. E. van Vogt was one of the best sci-fi writers in the world. This is his most popular book.

People live on Earth in the year 2650, and they live in a world that doesn't follow Aristotle. The Games Machine, which is made up of twenty-five thousand electronic brains, decides how people live their lives. In this story, Gilbert Gosseyn doesn't know who he is. He has some amazing abilities, including a kind of immortality, and he wants to use them to find out who made him a part of an interstellar plot.

The World at the End of Time

by Frederik Pohl – 1990

W: Wan-To was the oldest and most powerful person in the universe. He or she played with star systems like a child plays with marbles, and he or she had a lot of power. Matter was so small a part of his mind that he didn't even notice humans.

To start, Wan-games To's made the stars on Newmanhome move. The climate started to get cold and the colony was forced into a desperate fight to live.

In Viktor Sorricaine's case, he was very interested in finding out what caused his world to speed up and go to the end of the universe at the same time. And the answer was something he couldn't even think of, even if he lived for a long time.

Accelerando

by Charles Stross – 2005

A new age has come, and it is called the posthuman era. Artificial intelligences have gone beyond the limits of human thought. Biotechnological creatures have almost killed off people. Molecule nanotechnology is all over the place. It can make and change itself at any time. Extraterrestrial contact is becoming more and more likely with each new day that goes by.

The Macx family is made up of three generations: Manfred, an entrepreneur who sells intelligence-amplification technology; Amber, who is on the run from her domineering mother and wants to be an astronaut; and Sirhan, Amber's son, who finds his destiny linked to the fate of all humanity. They are all struggling to stay alive and thrive in this accelerated world.

When it comes to the title: in Italian, accelerando means "speeding up," and it's used in musical notation to show how fast a piece moves. This word is used in a book by Stross. It refers to how quickly humanity as a whole and/or the characters in the book are moving toward the technological singularity. The term was first used in this way by Kim Stanley Robinson in his 1985 book The Memory of Whiteness and again in his Mars trilogy, which he wrote in the 1980s.

Wild Seed

by Octavia E. Butler – 1980

Doro is a person who changes bodies like clothes and kills his victims by accident or design, either by accident or design. It's not until he meets Anyanwu that he is afraid of anyone else. Anyanwu is a shapeshifter who can absorb bullets and heal with a kiss. She can also savage anyone who threatens the people she loves, and she can change into any animal she wants. She doesn't fear anyone until she meets Doro. When Doro and Anyanwu work together, they make a pattern of fate that even immortals can't imagine. They go from the African jungle to the colonies in the United States.

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