Who is lazarus long

Published by Putnam Adult, Contact seller. Within U. Soft cover. Vassallo illustrator. Unmarked, Clean And Solid Copy. Published by Putnam, Used - Softcover Condition: Good. Condition: Good. No Jacket. First Ed. First paperback ed. Good condition, moderate over all wear, covers yellowed, small tear to outer edge of front cover. Published by G. Putnam's Sons, New York, Used - Softcover.

Oblong softcover. Second edition, first printing. Illuminated by D. Lazarus makes a deal with him: he will recount tales from his life until he's fully rejuvenated. Within that time, Ira has to come up with something new for him to experience.

If he cannot, Ira must agree to let Lazarus die peacefully. Thus begins a kind of reverse- Scheherezade Gambit and a Framing Device for an exploration of vast swathes of Heinlein's universe from the point of view of this near-mythological figure. After Lazarus' rejuvenation, the novel abruptly changes tone and becomes a Time Travel adventure, as this is among the various suggestions that his friends come up with for things that he might do.

Given the vastness of human history to choose from, he elects to visit his own childhood family in Kansas City , Missouri. But a slight miscalculation or two might well end the career of this interstellar traveler for good. Born in in the third generation of a long-life selective breeding experiment run by the Ira Howard Foundation, Lazarus whose birth name is Woodrow Wilson Smith turns out to be unusually long-lived, living well over two thousand years with the aid of occasional rejuvenation treatments.

His exact natural life span is never determined. In his introduction at the beginning of Methuselah's Children he guesses his age to be years old. Approximately 75 years pass during the course of the novel, which ends with the first form of rejuvenation being developed.

However, because large amounts of this time are spent traveling interstellar distances at speeds approaching that of light, the year measurement is an expression of the time elapsed in his absence rather than how much time passed from his perspective. At one point, he estimates his natural life span to be around years, but this figure is not expressed with certainty. Heinlein acknowledged that such a long life span should not be expected as a result of a mere three generations of selective breeding, but offers no alternative explanation except for letting a character declare, " A mutation, of course—which simply says that we don't know".

Lazarus himself states that others with naturally long lifespans have existed, some predating him; he claims to have met the Wandering Jew and William Shakespeare.

Pinero possessed a machine that was capable of measuring how long a human would live. When Pinero measures Long, he does not provide an answer; he simply advises Long that the machine is broken. The story does not explicitly state whether Pinero's reading was simply so high as to defy belief, Lazarus' later travels in time made a reading impossible, or the reading indicates that Long will never die, though Lazarus seems to believe the last explanation.

He is actually told, at the end of Time Enough for Love, that he cannot die and, even though it is possible the statement was simply made in an effort to comfort him, it can be viewed as a legitimate claim because he and his family had, by that time, mastered time travel, allowing any death to be prevented by intervention.