redford%avoid.DEC@decwrl.ARPA (05/22/85)
From: redford%avoid.DEC@decwrl.ARPA (John Redford) Here's another recommendation for Kate Wilhelm's "Welcome Chaos". It's a nice treatment of immortality injected into a present-day soceity. It also has one of the best-drawn villains I've seen. He's not psychotic, he's not irrationally cruel, but he is definitely evil. This is the sort of book that a good mainstream author ought to be able to do on an SF theme. ** spoiler warning ** I agree that the fact that the immortality treatment kills half its patients would probably deter most people. Remember, though, that the treatment stopped you at your present age. The longer you waited to take it, the older you would be stuck at. (However, to quote Walter Jon Williams in "Knight Moves": "The price of being eternally twenty is eternal pimples.") Also, the longer you waited, the more likely it would be that accident or disease would get you. If you are gambling for eternity, even odds don't sound too bad. I also agree that it's unlikely that an immortality treatment would be a simple antibiotic. However, it's also unlikely that even that much would have been discovered in pre-war Germany. That's just something you have to suspend your disbelief about. The fact that the the treatment sterilized women would account for why it hadn't come up in the course of evolution. One thing that struck me is how Wilhelm was very definite about setting the novel in the present day. There wasn't a trace of any advanced gadgets, even ones that we might expect to see in five years. There is a home computer, for instance, but it's just a word processor connected to a modem. I think she did this to drive home the relevance of the war fever that she describes in the book. She doesn't want readers to ignore it by thinking that it is the result of an even more anti-Russian Administration. She is worried about the present government. I think we've seen some evidence for that worry even in SF-Lovers. Remember how many people complained about the ending of "2010"? (** Spoiler warning **). They didn't think that it was realistic that the ignition of Jupiter would make people forget their squabbles. I mean, really! If a second sun in the sky wouldn't distract people, what would? Even sf-lovers readers seem to think that conflict with Russia is inevitable. John Redford