The cover of the first edition
Immortality Inc. is a Science Fiction novel by Robert Sheckley. It was serialized in 1958-9 in the Science Fiction Magazine Galaxy Science Fiction under the name "Time Killer",and released as a standalone novel as its current title later in 1959.It follows the adventures of Thomas Blaine, a man from 1958 brought to the year 2110 at the moment of his death. He struggles to live in a world where life after death is accepted by everyone, and as a result, life has lost inherent value. As he seeks to find a place in this new time, in a new body, he is forced to cope with a world completely different from his 1958 home.
It won a Hugo award for best novel in 1959. The 1992 action movie Freejack is (very loosely) based on the novel.
Immortality, Inc. Contains Examples of:
- Artificial Afterlife: A variant. The afterlife itself is natural, but getting your soul there intact is a Million to One Chance without an expensive technological procedure.
- Death Seeker: Common enough. Once someone secured the survival of his soul (see Our Souls Are Different), why not go out in style? They even have suicide booths for that.
- A Good Way to Die: Thomas Blaine, who dies to give the boy he murdered a second chance at life. He even thinks about how complete his life in 2100 was already.
- Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: An unusual version: a rich guy, wishing to die in style, hires hunters to hunt and kill him. He can hunt and kill them back. The catch is, there's the scientific (and very expensive!) process to ensure that someone will have an afterlife—and without said process, to have one's soul survive death is almost a Million to One Chance. The rich guy has guaranteed afterlife and doesn't fear death, while the hunters mostly don't.
- Not Right in the Bed: Subverted. The protagonist is in the body of another man (quite legally—long story) and is afraid that lingering traces of that man's personality are taking over his own. When he meets the ex-girlfriend of that man, they have sex, and the protagonist is disturbed by his unusually rough behavior. Subversion comes then in the morning the woman says that the previous owner of the body used to be very gentle in bed.
- Our Souls Are Different: The scientists discover that human souls do exist — but most of them fracture on the shock of death. Those few who survive enter some indescribable place called the Threshold and go to the proper afterlife from there. (Nobody knows whether the fractured souls are Deader than Dead or if they can recover in the afterlife, but most people assume the former.) Then scientists design the process which can guarantee the soul's survival... for a huge sum of money, of course. Or for selling your young body for a rich old man to use.
- Poltergeist: Mr. Reilly becomes one following his failed body transfer. He haunts Blaine, blaming him for the failure.
- Suicide Is Painless: Thomas Blaine commits suicide willingly in order to allow the teenager he murdered 150 years ago to use his body to live life. Blaine notes he feels no pain in his death.
