Lester del Ray: The Dwindling Years: He didn’t expect to be last—but neither did he anticipate the horror of being the first!

Would you like to be practically immortal? No longer to count your years singly nor in decades but in centuries instead? Would such a prospect sound promising to you?

Lester del Ray’s short story The Dwindling Years, which was first published in 1956, is set in a world in which humans have found the key to a seemingly everlasting life by tapping the memory of the human cells and using it for rejuvenating the complete body over and over again and thus expanding life by centuries. What, however, are the side effects of this apparent gain in longevity? For starters, human relations are wearing thin because after seventy or a hundred years your attachment to another individual, even to your own children or parents, will cool off. Another side effect is that people’s readiness to take risks, and be they ever so unspectacular, has utterly declined, partly because the danger of losing a leg or an arm in an accident is more horrible if you know that the consequences will have to be borne for centuries now; and partly because why should you take a risk to bring about a change – e.g. by testing a new technology – if you have all the time in the world to see if you cannot achieve your aim in a less dangerous way. The result of this mindset is an increase in safety measures and a very conservative attitude towards change in general.