Methuselah lived to the age of 969, according to the Bible. Robert A. Heinlein wrote a story about a group of people who had the potential to live at least two or three centuries before going the way of all flesh and how they would be treated by their less fortunate peers in a futuristic society; hence the title.

Most of the characters in this story are members of the Howard Families. None of these families are actually surnamed Howard; the term refers to their affiliation with the Howard Foundation which sponsors their reproductive habits in the interests of making their progeny live as long as possible.

Fairly early in the story, we are told how it all started. A man named Ira Howard became a millionaire back in the American Civil War after snagging some highly lucrative government contracts. In the subsequent years of the "Reconstruction" in the South, he managed to multiply his fortune into several millions, and let us all recall that back in the mid-19th century a million dollars was a lot more impressive than it is now (inflation, you know). Then he found himself on his deathbed while still in his early forties. All the doctors could say was "old age." Apparently various parts of his body were shutting down and there was no cure available in what passed for medical science in those days. He thought that was ridiculous. It seemed to him that a combination of the scientific method and large amounts of money ought to be able to do something to attack such problems. So before he died, he set up a Foundation with the official goal of "extending human life."

The trustees decided to treat the problem as a breeding project. Young adults who had four grandparents all still alive were encouraged to marry other young adults from equally healthy and long-lived families. If two people who qualified were to marry, they immediately received a cash award from the Foundation (we are not told the exact amount, but I'd estimate it was at least a thousand dollars or more from the very start, to provide a strong incentive). Each time they were fruitful and multiplied, they received an additional cash award. This naturally encouraged large families: instead of regarding each new baby as one more mouth to feed on a limited income, you regarded each new baby as more money in the bank! Then their offspring were encouraged to marry other youngsters who were members of families registered with the Foundation, and qualify for cash prizes of their own.

This novel opens up roughly 240 years after the project started in the 1870s, and the results are remarkable. It appears that the membership of the Howard Families has swelled to 100,000, and many of them are over a hundred years of age and still looking young and fit. The main viewpoint character is Lazarus Long, who is past his 200th birthday and still going strong - which is the all-time record among the Howards; all of his contemporaries born in the early years of the 20th Century are already dead, as well as the previous generation born in the later decades of the 19th. (It is believed that he represents some sort of favorable mutation, although the younger generations of Howards have hopes of living longer than he already has.) Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries the Howards who were aging much more slowly than the average fell into the habit of changing their identities every couple of decades to avoid getting suspicious looks from their friends and neighbors. But by the early 22nd century they were starting to think that modern society was so progressive, so enlightened, so wisely administered, that they could reveal themselves to the world without being persecuted for their genetic advantages. A few years before the first scene of the story, it had been decided to permit a small portion of their membership - no more than ten percent - to voluntarily go public and offer to demonstrate to the media and government officials that they were several decades older than they looked.

At first, nothing much happened, largely because it was widely regarded as a hoax. But as the political leaders of the civilized world looked into it, they realized it was true. Unfortunately, the Howards had miscalculated badly in doing this, because they had assumed that logic would prevail in the thinking of the politicians and the scientists they consulted for opinions. Instead, the typical chain of thought appears to have gone thus: "These people are enjoying decades upon decades as 'young' adults and only gradually aging. I want to do the same thing. They say I can't because it's a matter of genetic selection. But since I desperately want to be able to duplicate what they are doing, they are obviously lying through their teeth about the genetic thing and are withholding some sort of secret drug or other process which can serve as the 'Fountain of Youth' for any human being! The monsters! Who do they think they are, to withhold the secret of eternal youth from the rest of the human race?"

Accordingly, orders go forth to round up all known Howards, inject them with truth drugs, start interrogating them about the names and addresses of other Howards they know of, start interrogating them on the subject of the secret drugs, vitamins, radioactive treatments, or other sneaky stuff that's been done to them over the years to make them age so slowly, and generally dig out the 'truth.' Sure, a troublemaker could suggest that this approach violates their civil rights, but the top politicians voted to waive such trifling considerations on the grounds that the sort of selfish scumbags who would withhold the Fountain of Youth from the world obviously don't deserve all the civil rights that decent people enjoy! This sort of logic is . . . breathtaking. Unfortunately, I don't necessarily regard it as an unrealistic portrayal of what might actually happen under such circumstances.

I should note that being a member of the Howard Families did not automatically mean you were stronger, or faster, or had a higher IQ than the average citizen. So if they were "superior" as I suggested in my title, it was only in the sense of being able to acquire more experience than anyone else as they went through life, and watching their long-term investments pile up. Nobody had ever heard of DNA when Heinlein was writing this story, so the subject of genetic engineering to deliberately improve the next generation in several different ways according to rigid specifications never comes up in his description of the history of the Howards. Just the old-fashioned breeding techniques concentrating on a single desirable characteristic and leaving all the others to chance.

The story seems to have been originally published in a magazine in two parts, and the dividing line is clear. The first part introduces the concepts I outlined above, and shows the Howards being rounded up by government agents to be interrogated (eventually a special detainment camp is set up for them in a remote area). Lazarus Long, our hero, is one of the few who evades arrest and does most of the legwork necessary to set things up for the great escape. Eventually 100,000 Howards hop into a huge spaceship which he stole and prepare to set out for parts unknown. The ship was built to be a much-slower-than-light colonization vessel headed for another star, so it has room (barely) for everyone, at least with the use of suspended animation equipment. End of Part 1.

Part 2 describes the adventures of the Howards on two different habitable planets they visit, each of which is already inhabited by an intelligent and generally non-violent alien race. Fortunately neither of these races feels it necessary to register an immediate objection to the very thought of a sudden rush of immigrants from another planet, but there are still problems that arise in each place, over time. Heinlein did a good job of giving each race a really alien perspective instead of making them act a great deal like human beings who just happen to be shaped kind of funny and speak with thick accents, as some science fiction writers have been known to do.

Most of what we see is filtered through the perceptions of Lazarus Long, who, as the oldest member of the families, has a more cynical view of human nature than most of his younger comrades. In an age when violence is frowned upon, he still wears a knife strapped to one leg and a blaster strapped to the other (concealed under his clothing, of course). We gather he'd feel naked without them. Since he, like Heinlein and most of his readers of 1940, had been born and raised in the early 20th Century and still had some attitudes he'd picked up back then, he provided a convenient bridge between the 20th and the 22nd. We could empathize with him. Decades later he was the principal character of a very long-winded book by Heinlein, but let's not go into that now.

It is worth noting that Heinlein did indeed feel that the human race would eventually get sane enough to leave most of the irrational old prejudices firmly behind. For example, one "psychometrician" of the Howard Families, in making a speech to explain the growing anti-Howard prejudice to his cousins (they all call each other cousin), draws a parallel to the situation of the American Negro way back in the dark ages of the 19th and 20th centuries, saying that the Negro resented the white man as long as the white man had various privileges which were not shared with him. This was a perfectly natural reaction, but when the artificial barriers were removed, the anger faded away over time now that there wasn't such a gross discrepancy to keep people frustrated. He then points out that the ability to live two hundred years or more before you die of old age arouses a similar jealousy among all those who lack this ability, and a desperate desire to obtain that same "privilege" for themselves.

I didn't catch the underlying point of that speech when I first read this story in my days as a fourth grader. I took the words at face value, i.e. explaining why the Howards were becoming unpopular with an otherwise enlightened world, without giving much thought to the brief comments about the former problems of the Negro. I was too young to immediately realize what sort of society Heinlein had to deal with in real life at the time he was actually writing this story way back in 1940. But more recently it occurred to me as I was reexamining the story that thorough racial segregation was still deeply embedded as standard operating procedure in the United States (particularly but certainly not exclusively in the states we call the South, as I understand it). I finally realized that Heinlein had a character referring in the past tense to a problem that was still very much in the present tense at the time of publication.

In other words, Heinlein wasn't happy with the racism that existed all around him but decided not to dignify it by writing a lengthy story in which American society finally overcame it somehow. Instead, he went one step further than you'd expect and wrote a story about a different form of discrimination in a future society in which the old white/black thing was casually dismissed as ancient history - a form of discrimination that had already been gone for so long that you had to remind a "modern" audience that it had once existed when you were making a point in a lecture. This was, I suggest, Heinlein's way of subtly saying to his readers of 1940, "The whole crazy racial segregation thing is going to disappear someday. Bear that in mind. It's a ridiculous idea that can't possibly last indefinitely in the rapidly changing modern world, and I don't even need to waste my time and yours arguing against it in great detail because it's doomed anyway!"

In keeping with that point, I might mention that while Lazarus Long is described as being distinctly redheaded and presumably Caucasian, detailed physical descriptions of most of the other Howards we meet onstage seem to be far and few between. Feel free to imagine their skin shades and so forth as being whatever you please - Heinlein won't mind. (In later books he would sometimes take the trouble to make it clear that one or more of the good guys were rather dark-skinned, or perhaps of very mixed ancestry which everyone accepted as normal, or not even human for that matter, but in 1940 he apparently considered it expedient to play it safe and just casually dismiss racism as old hat and let our imaginations fill in the blanks.)

If you're interested in seeing a classic from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, back in the days when describing a trip from one star to another was still a pretty new idea, you ought to take a look at this. As I once mentioned in another review of a Heinlein book, a fair number of the scientists working at NASA in the 1960s and afterward allegedly listed Heinlein as a major influence in their youthful decisions to go into that line of work. An engineer himself, he apparently had an unshakeable faith in the ability of human engineering to solve any necessary problems in order to get us to other planets - once we decided to make the effort. Accordingly, his stories tended to be set in futures where everybody took space travel (and television conferencing, and waterbeds, and other ridiculous ideas) absolutely for granted, to encourage the attitude that of course these things would all come to pass in due time.

I hesitated on how many stars to give this one. 4.5 might have been my choice if that one existed. In its absence, I decided to go with 5. Lazarus Long is probably the only really well-developed character in the story (some may disagree here), but the various problems he and his relatives encounter are thought-provoking, which was obviously Heinlein's intent, and I really enjoy reading the story, which is a definite plus. The sad thing is that I still find Heinlein's earlier works of the late 30s, 40s, and 50s to be more readable than a lot of the SF coming out in the past decade or so. It must have something to do with his personal style in storytelling, something that's apparently quite hard to imitate (although I wouldn't mind seeing more people try).

Note: This story has been reprinted in paperback from time to time, even if the Epinions listing doesn't admit it.

Recommended: Yes