Consequences of immortality explained.

     Immortality is a common topic in science fiction, notably covered by Robert Heinlein, Philip Jose Farmer, Greg Egan and Wil McCarthy. Heinlein dealt with immortality by creating a character named Lazarus Long and wrote of his boredom after just 2,000 years of life. Farmer wrote extensively about it in the World of Tiers series. Greg Egan covered the consequences of living on a computer chip in Permutation City. But I feel McCarthy has covered the implications of immortality the best, in this series of novels:

 

 

 

      The above quadrilogy is called Queendom of Sol. In those books, the characters are immortal. Not just the main characters, but everyone in our solar system. All I can really say is that if immortality interests you, then you need to read these books. And the 'hard' science, well, it goes way beyond anything I've read in a Clarke, Niven, or Asimov novel.

     In real life, McCarthy also holds a patent on wellstone, which is a substrate for artificial atoms. He wrote a nonfiction book titled Hacking Matter, which explains wellstone. He got the idea for wellstone from quantum dots.