James Gunn: The Immortals

James Gunn’s The Immortals is elegant, innovative—and chilling. Gunn’s take on immortality is simple enough, yet mythic—it’s all in the blood.

More blood.

Mutated blood.

With the right blood, you can live forever…

A man is born who is resistant to the disease of aging, and anyone with enough money on this Earth wants to know where he is, where his children are…

Because they could be tickets to immortality. Rich old men hankering for life everlasting. For the blood is the life…

I don’t know about you, but all that scares the bejesus out of me. We’ve seen it before, of course; it’s now the core of one of the great themes of imaginative literature, the vampire. One difference here is that it is not the upper class monster who conveys an unwanted deathlessness on a hapless commoner, but the hapless and elusive commoner who carries the highly desired trait.

James Gunn does it as straight science fiction, with a strong scientific underpinning. Very convincing. Clinical, medical noir. They should film it in black and white.

And that makes The Immortals a classic.

—Greg Bear

Story ideas come at unexpected times and develop in unexpected ways, and sometimes have lives of their own.

The idea for The Immortals came to me during my second stint as a full-time writer. The first was a twelve-month period back in 1948–49 after I had given up the idea of becoming a playwright and then of becoming a radio writer. I sold several stories (the first ten under the pseudonym of Edwin James) but not enough to live on and decided to return to the University of Kansas to get a master’s degree in English. Two years later I took a job as an editor for Western Printing & Lithographing Company of Racine, Wisconsin. It published paperback books and Disney comics for Dell and Little Golden Books for Simon and Schuster. I was supposed to create a science-fiction line. But when I attended my first World Science Fiction Convention (and my first convention of any kind) in Chicago in 1952 and learned from my agent, Frederik Pohl, that he had sold four stories for me, I decided to return to full-time writing.

Halfway through that period of about two and a half years, I came up with the idea for The Immortals. Science fiction’s appeal is its sense of wonder, its series of “what-ifs?” One day I began wondering about how humanity might actually achieve immortality. Those ideas are starting points, they develop into stories through research. Some creatures, I found, never die from natural causes. Another source suggested that people age because our circulatory system is inefficient; it doesn’t provide food for the cells when they need it, or remove the by-products of oxidation. What would happen if someone were born with a better circulatory system? And what if that improvement were capable of being transmitted to someone else through a blood transfusion? And what if the rejuvenating power might reside in a blood protein like the gamma globulins that provide passive immunity against infection when they are injected into other people (such as pregnant women, so that they don’t catch German measles)? Then the rejuvenation itself might be only temporary, lasting only about thirty to forty-five days, like the passive immunity conferred by gamma globulins. Those were the what-ifs that set off a process of story creation.

I sat down and wrote “New Blood,” which my agent sent to John Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction. It was published in the November 1955 issue. By then I had finished the second story in the series “Donor.” Campbell wasn’t interested in more stories about immortal blood, so I sold it to Startling Stories; it was scheduled for publication in the winter issue of 1955—but the fall issue was the last (Startling Stories wasn’t the only magazine I helped kill). I resold it to Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, where it appeared in the November 1960 issue.

By the time “New Blood” was published, I had moved my family from Kansas City back to Lawrence, Kansas, and had been asked to teach a couple of sections of English composition at the University of Kansas. Before the semester was over, I was invited to become managing editor of the University’s Alumni Magazine. I made a deal with the university to work only three weeks a month during the summers so I could use the fourth for writing. During the first summer I wrote “Medic,” which Bob Mills published in the July 1957 issue of Venture Science Fiction as “Not So Great an Enemy.” The second summer I wrote “The Immortals,” which Fred Pohl published in Star Science Fiction #4 in 1958.

By that time, Bantam Books had launched its science fiction line. I had already sold them Station in Space and The Joy Makers. The third book Dick Roberts accepted was The Immortals. It was published in 1962.

On the other side of the continent, Robert Specht, an aspiring screenwriter, was working in the Los Angeles office of Bantam Books. Each month a stack of paperback books arrived from the East Coast; one month Specht picked The Immortals to take home with him and, he later told me, decided immediately that he wanted to make it into a movie.

Four years later he was story editor for Everett Chambers on the Peyton Place television series, and he persuaded Chambers to go in with him to obtain the film and television rights to The Immortals. They contacted my agent, who by then was Harry Altshuler (Fred Pohl had gone out of the agenting business). We agreed upon a two-year option with modest payments every six months. I got three checks but the fourth never came. I wrote Bob Specht, who said that Chambers had dropped out, that he had tried the novel on every producer, director, and major actor in Hollywood without success, but that some new possibilities had opened up. We agreed upon a new contract that—to everyone’s surprise—actually developed into a film.

ABC had decided that it would make its own television films rather than renting them from Hollywood and use them on what it called the ABC-TV Movie of the Week. Suddenly TV scripts were in demand, and Bob Specht sold Paramount on The Immortals. It was filmed in the spring of 1969 as The Immortal, featuring Christopher George, Barry Sullivan, Ralph Bellamy, Carol Lynley, and Jessica Walter, directed by Joseph Sargent, and broadcast the following September. It was scheduled to be the first film in the new ABC series, but at the last moment was edged out by Seven in Darkness with Milton Berle.

Apparently the film rated well (“It ranked fourth in the eighty-city Nielsens,” Bob told me later), although, to be sure, the film had changed the focus from the social change created by the reality of immortality for a few to a chase story in which Christopher George was pursued by rich and powerful aging people lusting for his blood. ABC decided to commission an hour-long series, also called The Immortal, for the following year. Only Christopher George was carried over from the film (Bob Specht didn’t even get considered for story editor), and ABC decided to play the series for adventure instead of science fiction. But I won’t go into that.

During the interim Bob Specht called and said that ABC wanted a novelization of the screenplay to promote the series. I was offered one-third of the royalties and said, “Go ahead.” At the last minute I was phoned by Bantam to say that it couldn’t find a writer to do the novelization, so I wrote it myself. It may have been the only time that the author of a novel wrote the novelization of the script (our director of Special Collections called it “cruel and unusual punishment”). My consolation is that it was easy money: I wrote it in six days so that it could be published before the series started in September 1970.