64
votes
Accepted
Term for immortality that only prevents death from old age
Negligible senescence largely fits the bill.
Negligible senescence is a term coined by biogerontologist Caleb Finch to denote organisms that do not exhibit evidence of senescence (biological aging),...
- 239k
50
votes
Accepted
Science fiction story where a human is searching for immortality and meets an alien that has been searching for thousands of years
This is Cautionary Tales by Larry Niven.
It ends:
In the morning he arranged passage home to Sol system. Ten thousand years wasn't enough...no lifetime was enough, unless you lived in such a way as ...
- 53.7k
48
votes
Accepted
Is Elven immortality in Middle-earth tied to the Elven Rings of Power?
No, it wasn't like that at all. This was a special choice Elrond and his children had to make, dating all the way back to the end of the First Age, before the Rings were made. The Rings didn't even ...
- 16.4k
41
votes
Accepted
Man invents immortality, loses wife, spends life of the universe looking for her
This is "The Days of Solomon Gursky" by Ian MacDonald.
The story opens with Sol and his wife touring on bicycles and then moves through a series of vignettes as they use nanotech to evade ...
- 718k
36
votes
Term for immortality that only prevents death from old age
"ageless" would work as it means: something (or someone) that does not look or appear to grow older
Elrond's face is described as ageless (lotr, many meetings)
- 1,386
36
votes
What is the origin of the "being immortal sucks" trope?
(OK, let's not work ourselves into a place where everything is like everything else.)
Although TVTropes provides some examples of sucky immortality from ancient mythology, these are really just ...
- 16.4k
30
votes
Identify a science-fiction novel… key points: space travel, immortality drug, main characters stranded on distant planet, they eventually escape
I'm pretty sure this is World Without Stars (1966) by Poul Anderson.
It's set in a future where an "antithanatic" drug has made people effectively immortal, though people can still be killed ...
- 143k
30
votes
Book or a story about a group of people who had become immortal, and traced it back to a wagon train they had all been on
Could this be the short novel, Tuck Everlasting (1975), by Natalie Babbitt?
There are two film versions of the novel, from 1981 and 2002. The plot involves a family of settlers who stumble upon the ...
- 8,617
29
votes
What is the origin of the "being immortal sucks" trope?
Hercules, a.k.a. Heracles, hit his master Chiron the centaur with a poisoned arrow as friendly fire during a battle. Chiron was immortal in the sense that he would never age and would live forever, ...
- 6,692
27
votes
SciFi short story about eating only one special food to be immortal
Sounds like The Taste of the Dish and the Savor of the Day by John Brunner.
"I found that something brown and nondescript had been dumped on my plate..."
"I had only taken a small ...
- 53.7k
26
votes
Accepted
Story ID: enslaved geriatric protagonist hides in abandoned, but still functional, alien rejuvenation cabinet
I think this is Niven's A World Out of Time
The group pauses near some ruins, and the protagonist tries to hide from the slavers inside a cabinet/closet he finds in the ruins.
In the story, Corbell ...
- 60.7k
25
votes
Term for immortality that only prevents death from old age
Undying is a term that refers specifically to a state of never being in a process of dying (such as Tolkien's Undying Lands), and applies mainly to life, rather than ideas, art, or appearance. It does ...
- 13.3k
21
votes
Accepted
In which post apocalyptic SF novel is the South Pole (Antarctica) thawed? Humans live there
I believe this is "A World Out of Time" by Larry Niven.
From the Wikipedia description:
The Earth's climate has changed, despite its new location in orbit around Jupiter. Among the most ...
- 31.7k
21
votes
Accepted
YA novel involving immortality via drowning
The Live-Forever Machine
This is an early work by Kenneth Oppel, the author of such well-known works as Airborn. It’s got "machine" in the title, of course.
According to the Goodreads ...
- 119k
20
votes
Accepted
Story about a mother and her son on a generation ship becoming immortal
This is The Waves by Ken Liu, collected in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. The story was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 2013 but did not win.
It is told in a slightly ...
- 5,471
19
votes
Accepted
Story ID: Immortals Prone to Cancer
This is almost certainly Alfred Bester's The Computer Connection (aka Extro) which has many points of similarity with your list: group of immortals, Native American bride, power struggle, etc). ...
- 53.7k
19
votes
Accepted
60s sci-fi short story about immortality, virtual reality, and societal collapse
Is this "The Immortals" (1960) by David Duncan...?
Dr. Clarence Peccary has invented a drug called 'Y Hormone' that can slow one's ageing indefinitely.
The bottle contained a sample of the ...
- 134k
18
votes
Term for immortality that only prevents death from old age
Turning to roleplaying games, GURPS uses "Unkillable" for "immune to death by violence" and "Unaging" for "never growing older once mature".
- 3,553
17
votes
Looking for a novel about an immortal man probably written in the 1960s; follows his life through being an Inca king and a viking
I believe this is Ben Bova's series, Orion, about an immortal cave man, following his defense of Humanity through the ages. There are six books in the series.
John O'Ryan is not a god...not ...
- 23.7k
16
votes
Term for immortality that only prevents death from old age
Eternal youth. From Wikipedia:
Eternal youth is the concept of human physical immortality free of ageing. The youth referred to is usually meant to be in contrast to the depredations of aging, ...
- 187
15
votes
What is the origin of the "being immortal sucks" trope?
@duskwuff gives one small example of the ancient Greeks discovering problems with immortality. However this is a relatively minor point in one fable.
More significantly, the ancient Greeks invented ...
- 4,834
14
votes
What is the origin of the "being immortal sucks" trope?
It seems to me that other answers describe intentional eternal suffering inflicted by gods instead of the immortality being itself the cause of boredom or unhappiness as asked in the original question....
- 321
14
votes
Accepted
Looking for a novel or short story about an immortal shapeshifter cop/detective
The story is Hardshell by Dean R. Koontz, previously identified as the answer to Short story: Cop chasing serial killer, both are shape shifting aliens. I read it in Koontz's anthology Strange ...
- 117k
14
votes
Accepted
Sci-fi novel about search for immortality using nanobots while also causing a pandemic
"Prophet Without Honour" by Ragnar Tørnquist. (2001)
I feel so ashamed now. The book is an addition to an MMORPG "Anarchy Online" by Funcom. I played the game for ten years, but ...
- 465
14
votes
Online short story or novella about an astronaut returning to earth and finding only immortal children
This sounds like a portion of Larry Niven's A World Out of Time possibly the section called "Children of the State."
This novel features Corbell returning to Earth after 3 million years to ...
- 60.7k
13
votes
Accepted
Short Story About an Immortal Looking for a Wife
"To Be Continued", a short story by Robert Silverberg, first published in Astounding Science Fiction, May 1956, available at the Internet Archive. Maybe one of these covers will ring a bell.
...
- 171k
12
votes
Accepted
Short (?) story about immortality and end of mankind
Stars, Won't You Hide Me? by Ben Bova
Mankind invents immortality but the raw ingredients come from the Flower People. For each human made immortal a flower person must die,
The Others decreed that ...
- 14.9k
12
votes
Accepted
Doctor Who radio programme. Heard 1998. Scientist has transferred consciousness of his entire race into immortal robot bodies
This is a Blake's 7 audio drama called The Syndeton Experiment, broadcast in April 1999.
From the linked wiki page:
When they finally locate Dr. Rossum he's an elderly man with a weak heart who has ...
- 4,199
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible