THE DEEP ONES: "The Man Who Never Grew Young" by Fritz Leiber

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THE DEEP ONES: "The Man Who Never Grew Young" by Fritz Leiber

2semdetenebre
mei 15, 8:25 am

Well, assuming that time flows backwards and forwards, up and down and diagonally, I guess the idea is workable, although all of human history backwards in just a few pages is a pretty big order. Leiber handles it pretty well, even though I'm not sure I quite understand the mechanics of it. Still, the idea of being "absorbed" by one's mother is... interesting. And I love the bit about life beginning with one's disinterment.

3RandyStafford
mei 15, 6:31 pm

I liked this story when I first read it a few years ago, especially the idea of history running backwards to avoid the annihilation of nuclear war -- and returning, it seems, to the annihilation of pre-human hominids.

However, on the second reading, like >2 semdetenebre:, I'm a bit unsure of how the logic works in all this. Large historical trends run backwards and people are absorbed into wombs, but do bullets fly into guns? Do people walk backwards? Are the phonemes of speech reversed? There seems a logical contradiction in scale between how the time reversal works in specific contexts.

However, at least on first reading years ago, Leiber got away with it for me.

4housefulofpaper
mei 15, 7:29 pm

I got a copy of Night's Black Agents a few years ago (a UK paperback from 1977, not the original Arkham House edition, which would have been even nicer!). This story - a "transition" between the modern horrors at the start of the book and the two Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories that round out the volume - made little or no impression on me. On rereading it, my sense was that it's golden age science fiction more than anything else, the idea is the main thing. Also it's a response to the early years of the Cold War and fear of nuclear armageddon (there's an Asimov story where a nuclear blast has been filmed with a high-speed camera. On reviewing the footage the assembled military and scientific personnel come to the one frame that reveal the growing mushroom cloud to have a set of Devil horns - Leiber's story is in part that sort of story).

The mechanics of the thing confuse me to, unless the narrator is the only person who is aware that time now runs backwards (if that phrase makes any sense). Who is he anyway? Did an immortal (or ageless and immensely long-lived person at any rate) emerge from before the first civilization, do a Zelig until WWIII, then be cursed with a self-awareness of what the backwards flow of time is undoing? If everyone experiences the backwards flow as he does, then that raises all the issues noted in >3 RandyStafford:.

I did remember that other writers have used Leiber's idea since, and in the Wikipedia entry for Time's Arrow (a novel I haven't read, I ought to confess), it's noted that "According to {Martin} Amis's autobiography the story is narrated by the soul of" the central character, a German Holocaust doctor.