It is a story I heard of, but haven’t read myself so the details might be off.
The relevant detail is that there are immortals but their bodies are still susceptible to damage (no regeneration), so if you lose a limb, you live forever without that limb. Forever being a long time, immortals end up accumulating a ton of damage and they all end up a demented psyches trapped in diamonds.
I have no idea how central or tangential this is to the story.
Anyone?
I can’t help you, but it’s an interesting idea. Was anyone decapitated?
I can’t help but wonder which part lives? Or, if someone, like, takes a cannon ball through their chest that blows out their heart and lungs, how does the rest live on?
I have no idea since I haven’t read the story, but I am guessing you can still walk around, but you are no longer breathing and therefore you can no longer talk. You might also have some trouble moving your arms.
There’s the Struldbrugsfrom Gulliver’s Travels, immortals who just get older and older, but never reach the point of death from old age.
Probably not the story you are looking for, but the movie Death Becomes Her has a similar premise, with the women being immortal but destructible - they keep injuring themselves and get a plastic surgeon to use putty and spray paint to fix them up but eventually they fall down some stairs and shatter into pieces.
In the movie Zardoz, some of the immortals succumbed to senility and had to be kept in the equivalent of a nursing home; and the barbarian hero discovers that the heart of the immortals’ technology is an optical computer based on a huge diamond. Is that it?
I could have lived without seeing this:
And no, I don’t think that’s the one.
Added it to my queue. It does sound a lot like the story I am remembering. I would bet it was based on it.
That also sounds about right. The reference to Larry Nivens is also ringing some bells.
You haven’t seen anything yet. The entire film is filled with mind scarring images.
Even before I clicked the link, somehow I knew which photo that would be.
I’ve read a fair amount of Niven’s work, but this doesn’t sound familiar to me. Niven is a “hard” SF writer. He would want to come up with some mechanism for them to survive the damage. And “psyche trapped in a diamond” seems a bit too fuzzy for his tastes.
I don’t remember that bad costume. I had a different picture in mind thats a nchest and up one. Yeeee. Just think that’s a idol of millions of people known as James Bond.
John Ford’s novel Web of Angels includes a drug/treatment/process of some kind that drastically extends your lifespan by some multiple. He mentions that in rare cases the process gives you immortality but your body cannot repair itself. One character that appears in the novel has such an affliction and it is said that he always wears soft clothing without fasteners as even a slight scratch or abraded skin would never heal. It’s a minor point in the novel so I don’t know if that is what you are thinking about or not.