The Immortals

Introduction

Preface

Epigraph

Part I: New Blood

Part II: Donor

Part III: Elixir

Part IV: Medic

Part V: Immortal

J
ames Gunn's
The Immortals
is elegant, innovative—and chilling. Gunn's take on immortality is simple enough, yet mythic—it's all in the blood.

More blood.

Mutated blood.

With the right blood, you can live forever . . .

A man is born who is resistant to the disease of aging, and anyone with enough money on this Earth wants to know where he is, where his children are . . .

Because they could be tickets to immortality. Rich old men hankering for life everlasting. For the blood is the life . . .

I don't know about you, but all that scares the bejesus out of me. We've seen it before, of course; it's now the core of one of the great themes of imaginative literature,
the vampire. One difference here is that it is not the upper class monster who conveys an unwanted deathlessness on a hapless commoner, but the hapless and elusive commoner who carries the highly desired trait.

James Gunn does it as straight science fiction, with a strong scientific underpinning. Very convincing. Clinical, medical noir. They should film it in black and white.

And that makes
The Immortals
a classic.

—Greg Bear

S
tory ideas come at unexpected times and develop in unexpected ways, and sometimes have lives of their own.

The idea for
The Immortals
came to me during my second stint as a full-time writer. The first was a twelve-month period back in 1948–49 after I had given up the idea of becoming a playwright and then of becoming a radio writer. I sold several stories (the first ten under the pseudonym of Edwin James) but not enough to live on and decided to return to the University of Kansas to get a master's degree in English. Two years later I took a job as an editor for Western Printing & Lithographing Company
of Racine, Wisconsin. It published paperback books and Disney comics for Dell and Little Golden Books for Simon and Schuster. I was supposed to create a science-fiction line. But when I attended my first World Science Fiction Convention (and my first convention of any kind) in Chicago in 1952 and learned from my agent, Frederik Pohl, that he had sold four stories for me, I decided to return to full-time writing.

Halfway through that period of about two and a half years, I came up with the idea for
The Immortals.
Science fiction's appeal is its sense of wonder, its series of “what-ifs?” One day I began wondering about how humanity might actually achieve immortality. Those ideas are starting points, they develop into stories through research. Some creatures, I found, never die from natural causes. Another source suggested that people age because our circulatory system is inefficient; it doesn't provide food for the cells when they need it, or remove the by-products of oxidation. What would happen if someone were born with a better circulatory system? And what if that improvement were capable of being transmitted to someone else through a blood transfusion? And what if the rejuvenating power might reside in a blood protein like the gamma globulins that provide passive immunity against infection when they are injected into other people (such as pregnant women, so that they don't catch German measles)? Then the rejuvenation itself might be only temporary, lasting only about thirty to forty-five days, like the passive immunity conferred by gamma globulins. Those were the what-ifs that set off a process of story creation.

I sat down and wrote “New Blood,” which my agent sent to John Campbell, editor of
Astounding Science Fiction.
It was published in the November 1955 issue. By then I had finished the second story in the series “Donor.” Campbell wasn't interested in more stories about immortal blood, so I sold it to
Startling Stories;
it was scheduled for publication in the winter issue of 1955—but the fall issue was the last
(Startling Stories
wasn't the only magazine I helped kill). I resold it to
Fantastic Stories of the Imagination,
where it appeared in the November 1960 issue.

By the time “New Blood” was published, I had moved my family from Kansas City back to Lawrence, Kansas, and had been asked to teach a couple of sections of English composition at the University of Kansas. Before the semester was over, I was invited to become managing editor of the University's
Alumni Magazine.
I made a deal with the university to work only three weeks a month during the summers so I could use the fourth for writing. During the first summer I wrote “Medic,” which Bob Mills published in the July 1957 issue of
Venture Science Fiction
as “Not So Great an Enemy.” The second summer I wrote “The Immortals,” which Fred Pohl published in
Star Science Fiction #4
in 1958.

By that time, Bantam Books had launched its science fiction line. I had already sold them
Station in Space
and
The Joy Makers.
The third book Dick Roberts accepted was
The Immortals.
It was published in 1962.

On the other side of the continent, Robert Specht, an aspiring screenwriter, was working in the Los Angeles office
of Bantam Books. Each month a stack of paperback books arrived from the East Coast; one month Specht picked
The Immortals
to take home with him and, he later told me, decided immediately that he wanted to make it into a movie.

Four years later he was story editor for Everett Chambers on the
Peyton Place
television series, and he persuaded Chambers to go in with him to obtain the film and television rights to
The Immortals.
They contacted my agent, who by then was Harry Altshuler (Fred Pohl had gone out of the agenting business). We agreed upon a two-year option with modest payments every six months. I got three checks but the fourth never came. I wrote Bob Specht, who said that Chambers had dropped out, that he had tried the novel on every producer, director, and major actor in Hollywood without success, but that some new possibilities had opened up. We agreed upon a new contract that—to everyone's surprise—actually developed into a film.

ABC had decided that it would make its own television films rather than renting them from Hollywood and use them on what it called the ABC-TV Movie of the Week. Suddenly TV scripts were in demand, and Bob Specht sold Paramount on
The Immortals.
It was filmed in the spring of 1969 as
The Immortal,
featuring Christopher George, Barry Sullivan, Ralph Bellamy, Carol Lynley, and Jessica Walter, directed by Joseph Sargent, and broadcast the following September. It was scheduled to be the first film in the new ABC series, but at the last moment was edged out by
Seven in Darkness
with Milton Berle.

Apparently the film rated well (“It ranked fourth in the eighty-city Nielsens,” Bob told me later), although, to be sure, the film had changed the focus from the social change created by the reality of immortality for a few to a chase story in which Christopher George was pursued by rich and powerful aging people lusting for his blood. ABC decided to commission an hour-long series, also called
The Immortal,
for the following year. Only Christopher George was carried over from the film (Bob Specht didn't even get considered for story editor), and ABC decided to play the series for adventure instead of science fiction. But I won't go into that.

During the interim Bob Specht called and said that ABC wanted a novelization of the screenplay to promote the series. I was offered one-third of the royalties and said, “Go ahead.” At the last minute I was phoned by Bantam to say that it couldn't find a writer to do the novelization, so I wrote it myself. It may have been the only time that the author of a novel wrote the novelization of the script (our director of Special Collections called it “cruel and unusual punishment”). My consolation is that it was easy money: I wrote it in six days so that it could be published before the series started in September 1970.

Flash forward about twenty-five years. Some interesting things happened in the interim: Bantam Books reprinted the novel in 1968 and Pocket Books in 1979, and it got translated into Italian, Japanese, German, Portuguese, and French, and reprinted in Great Britain. But then, in the mid-1990s I got a telephone call from a woman who said she was calling from Disney Pictures
and was looking for the person who owned the feature film rights to
The Immortals.
“You've found him,” I said. Back in 1968, Paramount, when it took over the contract from Bob Specht, had elected to buy only the television rights, not the more costly feature-film rights.

That began a series of Hollywood experiences (which Vonda N. McIntyre has characterized as “hysterical enthusiasm followed by total silence”). Touchstone Pictures, a Disney subsidiary, was interested in making a feature film (“we see it as a major motion picture with a major star and a major director such as Sidney Pollack or James Cameron,” the Touchstone president told me, when I visited him with my agent, Dorris Halsey). But whoever at Disney was enthusiastic about the project got fired, and Disney did not renew the option. Before the Disney option had expired, however, another producer was already pursuing the rights (tipped off, we heard, by a screenwriter who had been asked by Touchstone to offer a “take” on the film), and he took over the feature-film rights on the same terms. But then he, too, did not renew the option. A third and then a fourth producer took options and were unsuccessful. Now the novel is once more under option, to Warner Bros.

During all this film hope and hype, I resold the reprint rights to Pocket Books and, at the editor's request, updated some of the material and added a new 20,000-word section in the middle. The Touchstone president had commented (perceptively, I thought) that it was really the doctor's story, so I filled in a middle section about Dr. Russell Pearce's search for the
elixir vitae.

People have not yet discovered immortality, although a recent article in
The New York Times
speculated that by 2,200 people may be living for six hundred years. But until then our only immortality may lie in progeny and books.

James Gunn

Lawrence, Kansas

TO RICHARD

Light breaks where no sun shines;

Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart

Push in their tides.

Light breaks where no sun shines

And death shall have no dominion.

—D
YLAN
T
HOMAS

T
he young man was stretched out flat in a reclining hospital chair, his bare left arm muscular and brown on the table beside him. The wide, flat band of the sphygmomanometer was tight around his bicep, and the inside of his elbow, where the veins were blue traceries, had been swabbed with alcohol and betadine.

His eyes followed the quick efficiency of the phlebotomist. Her movements were as crisp as her white uniform.

She opened the left-hand door of the big refrigerator and from the second shelf removed a double plastic bag connected by plastic tubing. There was a hole at the bottom for hanging the bags from an IV pole. The plastic bag was empty, flat, and wrinkled. A syringe needle on a length of clear, plastic tubing was attached.