First published 1989 (USA title Buying Time). New English Library paperback, 1990, pp300, c.90,000 words.
This is an exploration of one of science fiction’s common themes – life extension. What changes would such an invention bring about? In this case, the life-extension treatment requires very extensive surgical intervention and is therefore necessarily expensive. The process is also proprietary and a closely guarded secret, consequently the customers are charged all their worldly wealth, with a minimum of one million pounds. The treatment also has to be repeated every ten years, giving a total life expectancy, barring accidents, of close to a thousand years.
A few people get lucky, winning a lottery say, and can afford a treatment. Others might make their fortunes in business or crime. The trick to long life is the ability to repeatedly make a fortune from scratch, without fail, every ten years.
Dallas Barr, an American, is one of the lucky ones and already a hundred and thirty, having had nine treatments. Unusually, he is a risk-taker, fond of dangerous sports and of making his million in different ways each time. He is not scrupulous in how he comes by the necessary. He is approached to join a party of his fellow ‘immortals’, something he is not keen on as groups are likely to be targets for those objecting to the process. He is lured by being offered a meet up with Maria, the love of his life, who he had long assumed was dead. The aim is to recruit him to join a cabal of those who wish to use the power of the rejuvenation organisation for political ends.
What follows is a cat-and-mouse game of chase around the Earth and out into the Solar System. Those who have been approach but refuse to join are silenced – permanently. Guns abound, the bodies pile up. It is quite a romp, with considerable violence.
While the story is primarily told from Dallas’s point of view, once Maria is introduced, she gets interleaving chapters, although the point of view wanders from the chapter title character on occasions. One or two other characters and the author also intervene [e.g. p69, p195].
This imagined near future has some interesting technologies like credit cards that give you your account balance and ‘floaters’ that have replaced cars and aeroplanes. However, telephones are still wired and people smoke frequently. Taxi floaters have a driver, although AI’s largely pilot spaceships. Yugoslavia seems to be still in existence or has been reconstituted [p144], as have the Lire and the Mark as currencies.
Haldeman has fun with some aspects of the future: Alaska and the Florida Keys seem to have succeeded from the USA and become anarchistic, libertarian states where little law prevails. A JFK assassination conspiracy theory is tossed in [p75] and a cafeteria at a spaceport serves a ‘bad lunch’ [p50]. ‘The sport of boxing is still legal up in Queensland’ [p49]. Italians are always late [p72]. ‘1988 was the last year America had a sane president’ thinks an old guy [p133 – Ronald Reagan]. There is an amusingly annoying flight-computer on one of the spaceships. The menu for a brothel on an asteroid is described in lurid detail [p178], as is the medical procedures of the treatment [p213-5]. American service people still conclude conversations with ‘Have a nice day’ [p132].
Halderman writes well; notably superior to the usual for science-fiction books of speculative ideas. Occasionally he gives a character real depth and balance to ideas, such as Maria’s religious beliefs. He also imagines convincingly the experience of a spaceship launch from Earth, fast acceleration, and the boredom of long spaceflights when the view changes imperceptibly from day-to-day. He drops in considered phrasing on occasion, e.g. ‘ When we love someone we allow ourselves to be imprisoned by him, solid bars of a shared life’ [p249].
Overall, this is a well written and entertaining story, with a number of thoughtful passages and frequent witty throw-aways. It has a strong libertarian bent.
Wikipedia biography of Haldeman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Haldeman
Others’ reviews of the book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21623.The_Long_Habit_of_Living?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_24
© William John Graham, June 2024