Desire to be immortal? You can be in AD 2110. Just go to the Hereafter Insurance Company and hook yourself up to the Machine. There’s nothing to fear. That’s, if it happens to be working best, and if nobody slips another brain into the body when you’re not looking, and if you’re not on the poltergeist hate-list…

First posted in 1959 like a startling, groundbreaking novel from the future-then pushed to new cinematic limits as the feature film adaptation Freejack in 1992-Robert Sheckley’s about Immortality, Inc. unsettling eyesight of tomorrow is definitely a trenchantly witty book of a future where everything has improved except the bumbling human race, which simply can’t let itself like a good thing when it finally gets it.

Thomas Blaine awoke within a white bed within a white area and heard someone claim, “He’s alive now.” Then they asked him his name, age group, and marital status. Yes, that seemed normal enough-but what was this talk about “death injury”? Thus was Thomas Blaine released to the year 2110, when science had found out the technique of moving a man’s awareness from one body to some other, when a man’s brain could possibly be snatched from days gone by, as his body was at the idea of loss of life, and brought ahead into a “host body” with this amazing potential world. But that was just a small a part of it, for the future experienced proved the reality of lifestyle after loss of life and discovered worlds beyond or simultaneous with this own-worlds where, through scientific methods, a man could live again, in another body, when he passed away here-and got along the way established the reality of ghosts, poltergeists, and zombies. What achieved it all mean? How had this breakthrough of what they known as the “hereafter” formed the world of 2110? Thomas Blaine found himself surviving in a potential where in fact the discoveries and methods imagined by folks of his time, though realized, had been completely overwhelmed by discoveries no one had ever imagined.