See Tyler’s post below, Lawrence Solum, and Tyler’s Marginal Revolution post. Would immortals-by-lifespan who were not invulnerable be very, or infinitely, risk averse? Would they be very unambitious and inactive, since there would always be time for stuff later?
I’m not going to get into the genuine intellectual issues at stake, just going to enjoy the chance to survey some SF, fantasy, and related genres of fiction.
A correspondent of Solum’s says that in ‘contemporary vampire fiction’ vampires are extremely risk-averse. I suppose that this refers to the Anne Rice novels, none of which I’ve read. But it does invite an obvious question about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was otherwise generally very good about imagining a world that made sense given its initial premisses. Why would any vampire hang out in Sunnydale? The Master was bound into the Hellmouth, and some of his servants were bound to him. Occasionally there was a vampire who wanted the glory of killing a Slayer. But then there were the countless, often nameless, vampires who just inhabited the town and treated it as their feeding ground– until they got staked. The Hellmouth might have attracted demons, made it more likely that new vampires would be created, and generated generic magical weirdness. But wouldn’t an even-remotely-rational vampire, even one who had been created in Sunnydale, move out of town immediately upon realizing that he or she was much more likely to get destroyed there than any other place in the world? Even the glory-hounds must have thought that the glory of killing a Slayer was inordinately valuable, given that they should have wanted to avoid any risk at all of getting slain. Instead, they continued to congregate in the least rational place for them to do so.
Robert Heinlein’s Lazarus Long was not highly risk-averse– but he did not know that he was going to turn out to be immortal, and by the time he knew, his habits of mind, his aversion to boredom, had been very well-set. Many of his fellow Howards did become very conservative and risk-averse, especially those who were born after the advent of rejuvenation and who therefore knew all along that they were functionally immortal.
The characters in Poul Anderson’s Boat of a Million Years have interestingly varied reactions– some but not others become extremely conservative for parts of their lifespan.
Characters in the Highlander universe of course face a somewhat different incentive structure. They are immortal– but know that only one of them will be truly immortal, the last one to survive the last swordfight. That creates an incentive to engage in swordfights along the way, so as to remain in practice. [NB: Yes, there are also intermittent claims about each immortal ‘gaining the power’ of each other one he or she kills in combat– but there’s not a lot of consistency about just what that means, and whether that ‘power’ makes one more likely to win the next fight.] Accordingly, we again see variation in strategies adopted, from the strategy of spending centuries at a time on holy ground (off limits for swordfights), in order to protect one’s immortal life, to the strategy of fighting all the time in order to hone skills and increase the chances of being the last survivor.
Isaac Asimov’s Spacers, on the other hand, almost all become extremely risk-averse, even though they only hane lengthened lifespans rather than infinite ones.
[For those wondering about Tolkien’s elves: they may well be a special case, as there are mixed suggestions about what happens when one is bodily slain, and some suggestions that they cannot be permanently bodily destroyed.]
Often even when some of the long-lifers/ immortals grow risk-averse, the narrative centers around the one(s) who doesn’t/don’t, and implicitly or explicitly condemns extreme risk-aversion. The wisdom gained over long life teaches that life has to be lived in order to be worth living… or something like that. But that might well tell us more about the demands of narrative than about what immortals would actually be like– the risk-averse just aren’t the most interesting people to tell most kinds of stories about…
UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, lots of e-mail on this one. Some clarifications:
1) Tolkien’s elves can, of course, die of wounds or poison. They can also lose the will to live. But in either case they travel to the Halls of Mandos and reside there, apparently incarnate. It’s left unclear whether doing so differs in any clear sense from simply travelling over the sea to Valinor; the long-term existence of an elf who is shot with an arrow may not be that different from the long-term existence of one who just sails away. Moreover, the texts that suggest life with Mandos is not embodied also suggest that it is possible to become re-embodied— in a substantially identical body with the same name, spirit and memories. Both Finrod and Glorfindel apparently did so. Whether one re-embodies in Valinor or in Middle Earth, Elvish ‘death’ seems to be a lower-stakes affair than most other variants of the same.
2) Lazarus Long talks a lot about being risk-averse and a coward. What he means by this is that he’s not stupid, that once he’s decided on a course of action he does everything he can to make sure he survives the course of action, and that his primary goal in a fight is to be the one standing at the end. I stand by my characterization, though. He does not become what he calls ‘sot in his ways,’ as many other Howards do. He persists in living a life that has a great deal of risk, danger, and violence in it. He tries to make sure that he can beat the odds, or he rigs the game; but he insist on playing rather than sitting it out.
3) Vampires. The same person who wrote to Solum writes to me, asking to continue to remain anonymous (what, you think there’s something embarrassing about spending one’s time on this sort of thing??)
The specific works that came to mind when I was thinking of ‘behind the scenes’, ‘incredibly risk averse’ older vampires working through proxies were Blade II, Underworld, any of the Vampire: The Masquerade series of role-playing/computer games, and actually, Buffy. The vampires you mention as wandering around waiting to be staked are, for the most part, stupidly young, and pretty dumb, but there’s a couple of immortals (vampires/demons, etc.) who do prefer not to be seen and work by proxies. (The “Senior Partners” of Wolfram & Hart in Angel, for instance.) It’s a pretty common theme in vampire fiction: the really old guys stay in the castle/hideaway/headquarters whilst sending out minions because they’re too scared of losing their eternal lives.
Anne Rice novels are a bit of an exception–even the very old vampires are pretty careless, and very few are manipulative, behind-the-scenes actors. However, the truly old ones are usually completely nuts anyway.
I also got the following entertaining missive from Gerry Canavan:
I’ve had the same
thoughts about the premise of the show for a long time, and have come up with a couple of theories:1) The Hellmouth attracts them to such a degree that they stay DESPITE the apparent illogic of staying, ie, they’d rather be near the Hellmouth with Slayer than anywhere else without Slayer.
2) As we’ve learned from Angel and the episode “The Wish,” there’s a great deal more “Champions” than just the Slayer, from high-powered Vamps with Souls to just generic “White Hats”…it may well be that most places are also somewhat dangerous for vampires, shifting the odds back in Sunny
dale’s favor.3) Eventually Buffy will die, and when that happens, the Hellmouth will be the place to be (see for instance the episode where Buffy came back from the dead). They may be betting that she’ll die relatively soon (she is rather long-lived for a Slayer).
4) Your argument is fundamentally correct, and most vampires/demons DO stay away from Sunnydale. Corollary: the earth has many more demons than we might have thought. This seems to be the case, at least on Angel…Los Angeles seems to be crawling with as many or more demons/vampires than Sunnydale has.
More than vamps, what bothers me is the fact that all these apocalyptic demon cults would do a lot better if they planned their apocalypses in, say, Guam. They really should have done at least a few episodes where Buffy had to leave Sunnydale to fight big bad world-ending evils elsewhere. [JTL’s note: the cult-plots typically do seem to depend on the Hellmouth, in a way that ordinary vampire feeding does not..]
5) There’s some evidence on the show that knowledge of the Slayer isn’t very well known among demons or vampires. Your powerful, very old Demons know the Slayer exists, but most vampires probably haven’t ever heard of one, and many of those who do discount the Slayer as a kind of “vamp boogeyman” that doesn’t really exist.
Buffy even sometimes meets Vamps in Sunnnydale who don’t know there’s such a thing as a Slayer (in, for instance, the Gift.)
This may also have something to do with the fact that she’s so long-lived for a Slayer. Most vampires wouldn’t even hear that she’s in town before she bought it.
One other thing you might have mentioned: we know there’s also a Hellmouth in Cleveland (also from “The Wish”), and it seems obvious that THAT is the place all smart demons should go. Downside: then they’d have to live in Cleveland. How does the rational demon handle THAT one?
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