Maurice Nicoll 3 hr 33 min read

A scientist unleashes a blue microbe that confers immortality on all who catch it, and a world suddenly freed from the fear of death must reckon with what that freedom does to the human soul.

Maurice Nicoll's 1918 novel (as Martin Swayne) is a thoughtful dystopian social-SF tale of enforced deathlessness. Provocative, philosophical, of its era. Read it for an early, searching story of contagious immortality, where the abolition of death upends morality, meaning, and the whole order of human life.

In its time

Published in 1918, during the 1910s, lost worlds and interplanetary adventure.

Reading it

3 hr 33 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).