Balmarog

Don't limit yourself to thinking that death is the only risk one can take. People who can't die can still have much to lose. Besides, a good story teller can turn anything into a good read.

__________________
"Science again! I said science again!"
-Homestarrunner

Mr Sci Fi

And all that an immortal can lose has been done by Anne Rice already. Immortals are now boring.

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"The writer you envy today will probably have reason to envy you tomorrow." - Orson Scott Card

slayerofangels

I've always thought that a character who is completely invulnerable would be a fun thing to write, given he/she would be blind and perpetually suffocating/hungry, depending on how you wrote it...

__________________

For Sale: One soul. Mint condition, never been used.

Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster. And if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Balmarog

Everything has been done before. The trick is to make it your own and give it a new twist. Maybe the focus of the story is on an immortal who's literally been in a cave for the last century and has just broken out of a depression caused by seeing his last descendant die and now he has to adjust to life in a world completely different from the one he once knew.

__________________
"Science again! I said science again!"
-Homestarrunner

slayerofangels

That sounds a bit like interview with a vampire. Though being immortal, I imagine he'd be in a singular position to enjoy the improvements in sanitation over the last few centuries...

__________________

For Sale: One soul. Mint condition, never been used.

Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster. And if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Mr Sci Fi

No, it hasn't.

__________________
"The writer you envy today will probably have reason to envy you tomorrow." - Orson Scott Card

slayerofangels

Like my invulnerability thing for example.

__________________

For Sale: One soul. Mint condition, never been used.

Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster. And if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Balmarog

Has too.

__________________
"Science again! I said science again!"
-Homestarrunner

Mr Sci Fi

This is a cop out for unimaginitive writers. Nothing more.

__________________
"The writer you envy today will probably have reason to envy you tomorrow." - Orson Scott Card

Balmarog

Not so. I just think that most everything has been done in one form or another. This is taken from an extreme perspective though that would color anything influenced by another work as 'unimaginitive.'

When I say 'give it a new twist,' I don't mean re-write a story and change the names of characters and places and at the end the main character's naighbor dies instead of his wife. I just mean that virtually everything we come up with, no matter how original it seems, is influenced by something else.

It's hard to explain what I mean, but I didn't mean it to come out as cynnical as it sounded.

__________________
"Science again! I said science again!"
-Homestarrunner

ClancyBoy

Depends.

If they're sooper kewl l33t immortal Anne Rice style vampires, then yes that's dumb. What if immortality came with a terrible price though? What if immortality, in a word, sucked.
What if something along the lines of Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, or Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray happened? That could be interesting.

There are so many reasons that people weren't meant to live forever. You could really go any direction with that. Does eternal life guarantee eternal youth? Probably not. Imagine how worn-out and gnarly a human body would look after 900 years. I mean, just the wear and tear on the joints alone...

Also insanity is an absolute given. Insanity on a level never before witnessed.

__________________
"Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons wait for you down there. Little pets they are, little little little pets. Cute little things, they say. Don't you believe it. No man ever saw them and walked away alive. You won't either. That's the final dash, flash. That's the utter clobber, cobber." --Cordwainer Smith, Norstrillia.

ClancyBoy

My bad. He's nigh invulnerable.

Hark, upon the wind my ears do hear the distant mournful baying of a lazy writer!

It sounded like you were using it as an excuse.

__________________
"Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons wait for you down there. Little pets they are, little little little pets. Cute little things, they say. Don't you believe it. No man ever saw them and walked away alive. You won't either. That's the final dash, flash. That's the utter clobber, cobber." --Cordwainer Smith, Norstrillia.

Balmarog

k

__________________
"Science again! I said science again!"
-Homestarrunner

Rambling Sage

Mr Sci Fi- can you make up for all mistakes? i don't think so
and i think it is obvious that i am saying that the character will not be a "super cool uber character who pwns everyone"
like i said, being immortal doesn't make you super cool and able to pwn everyone.

__________________
If one is lucky,
a solitary fantasy can totally transform
one million realities.

Faustling

Or maybe, for once, it didn't suck. Vampires or not, I find it hard to think of any immortals in litterateur that really enjoyed their long life. Some might handle it better then others but I've yet to read someone say: "It sure feels great to live forever and I can always get new loved ones as the old ones die". I'm sure there are examples of this as well but I bet they're fewer then the "Oh, the immense angst of immorality" or at least "Oh, the angst of the price I must pay to stay alive".