![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() How to Stop Time’s Tom Hazard was born in 1581, but he has what he calls a “condition”: he ages 15 times more slowly than the average human and thus appears in the present day to be only 41. Set partly in a 21st century seen through the eyes of people that have just about seen it all, the novels put a fine point on how our time is different from any other era in history - we have dating apps! digital currency! Trump! - and how it’s exactly the same. By contrast, there is nothing special or ambitious about the immortal (or near-immortal) protagonists of two new novels other than their preternatural age: In Dara Horn’s Eternal Life, Rachel is a 2,000-year-old woman who can’t die, and in Matt Haig’s How to Stop Time, the narrator is a 400-year-old man named Tom. ![]() These stories tend to be of the overreaching, tortured sort: immortal beings - gods, vampires, genies, eldritch horrors - tormenting mortals or being tormented by them forever, say, or humans going to great lengths to transcend death and failing (see: Gilgamesh, the many pursuers of the Elixir of Life, Voldemort, sci-fi Übermenschen, Peter Thiel). THE MOST COMPELLING EVIDENCE that people have always wanted what they can’t have is the abundance of stories about immortality, one of the hoariest tropes in literature. ![]()
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