Walter Besant 3 hr 30 min read

In a future where science has conquered death and mankind lives forever, the deadening changelessness of immortality has drained all art, passion, and progress from a stagnant, undying world.

Walter Besant's 1888 novel is a thoughtful early dystopian tale. Provocative, sobering, of its era. Read it for a striking Victorian meditation on the curse of immortality, a society made joyless and inert by the abolition of death, in a pioneering dystopia that probes what makes life worth living, decades before the genre's golden age.

In its time

Published in 1888, during the 1880s, lost races and dying earths.

Reading it

3 hr 30 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).