The Immortals -- Tracy Hickman

The Immortals

Tracy Hickman

Roc, 1996

Tracy Hickman is known for his science fiction and fantasy, co-creating (with Margaret Weis) several internationally bestselling series, including Dragonlance, The Death Gate Cycle, and others.  With this novel, one which he admits he had a difficult time getting published, Hickman sets out on his own and does a superb job bringing a horrific near future into the now.

It is 2010 (the novel was published in 1996) and the world has been overrun by the even more deadly successor to AIDS, an immunity deficiency syndrome called V-CIDS.  It has devasted the world's populations and in the United States drastic measures have been taken by the wealthy and powerful to ensure that it doesn't spread.  Since it seems to have originally presented in the gay community, gays were rounded up and quarantined, sent to special confinement facilities until a cure could be found.  Any and all who present with V-CIDS are sent there.

Reading like a technologized version of the Nazi round-up of the Jews and other "undesirables", The Immortals begins with the capture of a young gay man trying to get home to his estranged father, a media mogul.  He knows he has V-CIDS and has been on the run.  The rest of the book deals with the father's attempts to find his son, literally and figuratively.

Michael Barris, determined to find his missing son, gets himself sent into the area controlled by ERIS -- Emergency Relocation and Isolation Service -- and assigned to a camp called Newhouse.  Here he finds a horrifying system of makework and death.  The camp is divided into two parts, the Gays and the Straights and no one crosses The Line, a road that runs between the barracks of the two fearful and mutually hating groups.  To keep them always separate, straights rule the day while gays only come out at night.  And the dead drop by the hundreds daily, only to be put aboard a "death train" of pallets, the same pallets that bring in the new internees.

Michael finds the system intolerable, especially when he is rebuffed by his newly found son and then witnesses the lethargic wasting away of the children of the camp.  He sets out to change a few things.  He finds out the truth behind the relocation facilities and their purpose.  He also finds out a terrible secret that could destroy everything he beleives in, something he must circumvent against overwhelming odds.

Although the conflict of gay versus straight and the deadly virus that has brought humanity to these pathetic straits are important, they are merely a backdrop to the novel.  The novel is ultimately about relationships and how we view each other.  It is colorfully peopled by a controlling ultraconservative preacher (who leads the straight side of camp), an apathetic nurse, a stoic but caring death train foreman, the Dark Queen (who is the "face" of the leadership in the gay part of camp), a curious and rambunctious young cowboy, a fugitive symphony conductor (the real leader in the gay camp), a recreations administrator/con artist keeping up the ruse that the actual recreations headman is long dead, a host of hostile and angry people, and a sensitive Captain with ERIS that gets emotionally involved with those he is to oversee.

A great and chilling novel, The Immortals not only shows us who we are, but where we could be headed.  Some of the events Hickman describes are eerily present now and, although AIDS hasn't given way to a more virulent and deadly plague yet, the warnings are everywhere.  The Immortals is also a social commentary on how easy a nation like the United States, given the right (or wrong) impetus, could quickly turn into a police state.  Both disheartening and uplifting at the same time, The Immortals is a great book and should be read by everyone.  Because, in the end, what really matters is not how wealthy we are or what or sexual orientation may be, but how we treat our fellow man.