The Long Habit of Living (1989)
The Long Habit of Living is a 1989 immortalism book written by Joe Haldeman.
Joe Haldeman imagines a world where death has become optional, for a price. The Stileman Process restores youth and grants another full lifetime, but each treatment costs nearly everything the recipient owns. Dallas Barr, one of the earliest immortals, has ridden this cycle for generations, always rebuilding his fortune before the next renewal comes due. When he stumbles onto a conspiracy inside the foundation that controls the process, the bargain that kept him young starts to look like a cage. Haldeman writes it lean and hard-edged, with the dry wit of a veteran science fiction craftsman.
Quick answers
What is The Long Habit of Living about?
Joe Haldeman imagines a world where death has become optional, for a price. The Stileman Process restores youth and grants another full lifetime, but each treatment costs nearly everything the recipient owns. Dallas Barr, one of the earliest immortals, has ridden this cycle for generations, always rebuilding his fortune before the next renewal comes due. When he stumbles onto a conspiracy inside the foundation that controls the process, the bargain that kept him young starts to look like a cage. Haldeman writes it lean and hard-edged, with the dry wit of a veteran science fiction craftsman.
When was The Long Habit of Living published?
The Long Habit of Living was published on 1 October 1989.
Who made The Long Habit of Living?
The Long Habit of Living was written by Joe Haldeman.
Similar books
A few thoughts on The Long Habit of Living
Fans of trading years for money should watch In Time, where minutes are literal currency and the poor age out fast. Altered Carbon carries the same immortality-for-the-rich unease into noir cyberpunk, bodies swapped like clothing. For a colder, quieter angle on one man living across the ages, the film The Man from Earth talks its way through a single immortal's memory of centuries.
Immortality that only the rich can actually afford
Dallas Barr buys his way back to youth through the Stileman Process, a cost so steep it swallows everything he owns, and these seeds strike the same bargain. In Time makes minutes currency the poor burn through fast, Self/less lets the wealthy pay for new young bodies, Zardoz splits an immortal elite from a dying mass, and Altered Carbon lets the rich hop between bodies while everyone else stays mortal.
Science fiction heroes who outlive every normal lifespan
Dallas Barr has ridden the same extended-life cycle for generations, rebuilding his fortune before each renewal comes due, a scale these classics share. The Forever War, Haldeman's other major novel, strands a soldier across centuries thanks to relativity, Methuselah's Children follows Lazarus Long's long-lived clan across an equally long road, and The First Immortal turns cryonics into an actual second life.
The real price of never dying, examined seriously
Haldeman writes Dallas Barr's endless renewals with a dry, world-weary wit, and these works sit with the same question from other angles. Huxley's After Many a Summer watches a longevity treatment curdle into something monstrous, Saramago's Death with Interruptions imagines a country where dying simply stops, and Four Thousand Weeks argues our short span is worth embracing rather than escaping.