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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ManyMoose who wrote (53491)	11/15/2006 4:28:12 PM
From: Alan Smithee	Respond to of 90947

I would like to see Laz be resurrected. By all accounts, Laz is doing quite well, although he is quite long of tooth. Lazarus Long is a fictional character featured in a number of science fiction novels by Robert A. Heinlein. Born in 1912 in the third generation of a long-life selective breeding experiment run by the Ira Howard Foundation, Lazarus (whose birth name is Woodrow Wilson Smith) turns out to be unusually long-lived indeed, living well over two thousand years with the aid of occasional rejuvenation treatments. His exact (natural) life span is never determined. In his introduction at the beginning of Methuselah's Children he guesses his age to be 213 years old (he's actually 224). Approximately 75 years pass during the course of the novel, which ends with the first form of rejuvenation being developed. However, due to the fact that large amounts of this time is spent travelling interstellar distances at speeds approaching that of light, the 75 year measurement is an expression of the time elapsed in his absence rather than how much time passed from his perspective. At one point, he estimates his natural life span to be around 250 years, but this figure is not expressed with certainty. Precisely because Lazarus possesses an unnaturally long life span even for a Howard (particularly a third-generation one), this has inclined some to believe that his longevity arises from a spontaneous mutation. However, Heinlein himself evinces hostility toward the idea that we may explain Lazarus' longevity by invoking any deus ex machina mutation. This is done through Long himself, who admits that, while a mutation is an answer, it doesn't actually explain anything.