Book Review - The Postmortal

The Postmortal by Drew Magary is set over a 60 year period starting in 2019, shortly after a geneticist discovers the cure for aging. Our hero, John Farrell, is one of the first people on Earth to receive The Cure. People who receive The Cure can still die from cancer or getting shot or stabbed or run over by a bus, but they will never die due to old age. The book is told from Farrell’s point of view via an online journal he’s kept.

The thing about The Postmortal that really grabbed me was how plausible it all seemed. There are no flying cars or hoverboards or any of the other “futuristic” things that movies and books and TV shows that take place in the future usually have. Every technological advance that the book posits is a logical extension of the technology we have today: cars are electric, everyone has their own tablet and nationwide Wi-Fi becomes a reality (to name a few).

In addition to plausible technological advances, the book’s vision for what people would do with themselves if granted a cure for aging is very much what I imagine would happen in real life. Divorce rates skyrocket and “cycle marriages” (a marriage contract with a set end date) become increasingly common. The prospect of spending 40 or 50 or 60 years with someone when you know both of you will end up dead is palatable, spending 1,000 years with someone is less so. Military service rates plummet. Suddenly, dying for your country doesn’t seem all that appealing when you could be sacrificing centuries of your life, rather than just decades.

I’ve been reading Magary’s work online for years now, and it mainly consists of him making dick jokes and ranting about things in ALL CAPS, so I had no idea he could write a book this thoughtful, intense and engaging. Clocking in at just over 360 pages, the book is a quick read, but the issues it tackles have stuck with me. Would I get The Cure if it were discovered and made publicly available? Probably. I’d feel like a real jackass if people all around me were ageless and I was the only one getting older. Would I still want to be married if it meant being with my wife for hundreds of years? I sure as hell would hope so. Would I want to continue living in a world that was overrun with people who just won’t die? A world where a bottle of water is going to cost me 20 bucks? A world where some green faced troll could disfigure me at any time, just because he thought it was funny? (In the book, “trolling” has made its way from something done online to something done to people in real life.) I have a feeling that being ageless would get real old, real fast.

PS: Do yourself a favor and read this book before some idiot studio executive options it, mandates that it be rated PG-13 and casts Taylor Lautner as John Farrell.