Short story filter - anti-aging vaccine

December 27, 2021 3:12 PM

Trying to dig up a short science fiction story wherein a vaccination program has essentially made people immortal, with the caveat that it must be administered before puberty. This is causing resentment and violence among some adults. I don’t recall if the immortality is intentional or the side effect of a different inoculation. This would have been in a sci for magazine, probably Isaac Asimov’s. Publication date late-eighties to early nineties, at a guess. Any ideas?
posted by aspersioncast to Media & Arts (10 answers total)

Best answer: Nancy Kress's "Beggars in Spain"? Right magazine, 1993; it's a pre-birth treatment rather than a vaccination program though.
posted by severalbees at 3:27 PM on December 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Larry Niven's A World Out of Time featured a far-future Earth where people could be made immortal and eternally pre-pubescent with a pre-adolescence treatment. Niven often wrote multiple things in the same world, or riffed on a concept, so he may have had other works with the same idea.
posted by agentofselection at 4:08 PM on December 27, 2021

A World Out of Time was serialized in Galaxy magazine in 1976, so rather too early for your time period, but the description matches a plot point pretty exactly.
posted by agentofselection at 4:22 PM on December 27, 2021

Islands, Marta Randall is along those lines, well worth reading.
posted by theora55 at 4:54 PM on December 27, 2021

As a not-very-specific data point, this story sounds really familiar to me, and I would've been reading some F&SF, Asimov's & Analog mags between perhaps 1990-95. Maybe 70-30 that it would have been F&SF over Asimov's/Analog, as I was more likely to buy it if I couldn't get both.

I've got an errand to do first this evening, but if no one comes up with an answer you're 100% sure is correct, I'll skim through the ones I have and see if anything rings a bell.
posted by stormyteal at 5:01 PM on December 27, 2021

Best answer: I bet it was Earthchild Rising by Sharon Webb - a short version was published in Asimov's. More clues here (search for the word 'immortal' on the page).
posted by moonmilk at 5:24 PM on December 27, 2021

This is not the timeframe in question, as it was published in 2011, but a very similar plot: The Postmortal by Drew Magary.
posted by bluloo at 6:38 PM on December 27, 2021

Damon Knight's The Dying Man matches your description of the plot pretty closely. I’ve tried to link to pp. 172-173 of the collection which contains this story at Internet Archive and which describe the process which produced the immortality in hopes they’ll let you see them even if you don’t have an account.

But that story first saw print in 1967.
posted by jamjam at 11:31 PM on December 27, 2021

Response by poster: My dates could be slightly off, but definitely anything after 1995 is definitely too late.

Hmm, Beggars in Spain - could fit, although IIRC most if not all children have received the treatment. It was fairly . . . gritty and a bit dysfunctional. Aspects of it sound correct and I’ll look for a copy.

World out of Time or some variant *could* work, although I don’t think it was set in a far future to the extent of space cars and such. Also I knew who Larry Niven was by then. This is also true of Damon Knight because we had a collection of his short stories. I suppose I could be really getting some wires crossed if the story fits, although that sample doesn’t have the right feel.

Earthchild Rising really rings a bell too and I’m trying to find a few pages. Thanks all!
posted by aspersioncast at 7:33 AM on December 28, 2021

Is it Nosotros, No (Not Us) by José Bernardo Adolph?

(The original is in Spanish, but the only link I could find is an English translation.)
posted by queen anne's remorse at 1:03 PM on December 28, 2021