The Professor of Immortality by Eileen Pollack; Delphinium Books, 2019, ISBN 9781883-285821; 278 pages, $26.
SAN DIEGO –A Jew, a Catholic, and a Muslim are asked by their university professor Maxine Sayers what would be the effect on religion if everyone became immortal. The Catholic student says it would make the threat of eternal hell irrelevant. The Jewish student suggests people would tend to focus more on the good things of life, such as eating bread, drinking wine, or seeing a rainbow. The Catholic student says if you saw those things over and over through eternity, they might become very boring. The Muslim student, refraining from discussing her own religion, said the idea of reincarnation in Buddhism also would become irrelevant. However, she said, people still would have to learn to cope with suffering, which comes into every life.
Such was a comparatively optimistic assessment of what might happen in the future, if medicine continues to make advances that stave off death. Other technological advances may result in dystopia, where people would struggle to find meaning for their lives in a world where machines do all the work, and where the pursuit of “progress” often leads to the pollution of the sea and the fouling of the air as well as the elimination of privacy.
A character based on Theodore Kaczynski, the real-life Unibomber, is a dark presence in this book, as he sends bombs to people and institutions that he believes have been irresponsibly pursuing technological change without fear of the consequences. This novel’s “Techno-Bomber” has even issued a manifesto, Kaczynski-like, inveighing against the direction in which scientists and industrialists are taking the world.
Meanwhile, the professor’s grown son, Zach, has gone incommunicado and some of the wording of the manifesto reminds Sayers of Thaddeus, a lonesome, disgruntled genius whom she once taught and who had long ago befriended her son. Perhaps her fear is unreasonable, but could Thaddeus be the Techno-Bomber? And could Zach’s disappearance be somehow related?
Wrapped in some stimulating intellectual discussion about what the future might bring, The Professor of Immortality is an old-fashioned suspense mystery, which will have you wondering along with Professor Sayers, whether any of the world’s verities remain true.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com