How to Live Forever – just what is needed right now – is a concise, clear and phenomenally interesting account of the immortality industry. Not that many of us really want to live forever. Who could stomach an eternal existence, with all its concomitant sorrows and inconveniences, the inevitable collapse of all personal ambition, the infinitely diminishing enthusiasm for other people, places, activities and things, a dread of the morrow, and a total boredom with oneself – who wants all that? Yet while thinking folk might shudder at the prospect of living on and on like Ariston, they still refuse to embrace the alternative, for death remains every bit as distasteful as immortality.

And so it is that Man is driven by this squeeze into inventing all sorts of ways by which he might extend his life – not in order that he may live forever, but only so that he may never die; and out from the cracks of this paradox there