Thanks to a recent exercise in aggressive negotiations with a bunch of hippy do-gooders who got exactly what was coming to them, Rhymer Enterprises has acquired a lot of magic tech which we will of course use to either to make obscene profits and/or spread suffering and ignorance. Among these is a single Entropy Undoing Gun* which through complicated tehchnomagic means can turn back the calendar on the target. One zap, and the target is not merely made twenty years younger, but any degenerative disease he or she suffers from is undone.
We will not, of course, be using the EUD to make the world better IN GENERAL. That’s not our brief, and even if it were, two of the components can only be procured in Aman and there may be some bad feelings toward RhE from the Valar after my last visit to Middle-Earth.† But I hate to let usable tech go to waste, so I will be using the last twelve shots in the EUD to extend the lives of a dozen artists – novelists, singers, poets, painters, etc. I’m too lazy to pick the lucky few myself, so I’ll leave it to the Dope.
Only three rules:
You may not nominate yourself or any other Doper.
No scientists or politicians.
Most ESPECIALLY not Stephen Hawking.‡
Your suggestions, please. Please do more than name a name; give me a reason they deserve extra life & healing…
I didn’t name it. Shut up.
† I apologize for nothing. If the Ents didn’t want to be massacred en masse they should have stayed out of the way of my flame-thrower.
‡ Dude knows too much as it is. If he’d just stayed out of certain areas of research I would not have had to travel back in time and arrange for him to become sick in the first place. In fact, I need to go mess up all his notes again.
I’m confused by this. So if someone OD’s at 27, do you make him 7 again and he starts his career over or does he just not OD that night and lives to make another 20 years worth of art continuing down whatever path (artistically) he was on at the time. The only difference being that he got one of those invincibility stars, but it lasts 20 years and there isn’t sped up music in the background making him all nervous.
Of course not. That would be extra work for me. Anyway, I already undid Ian McKellan’s death in 1998, and that resulted in not only Return of the King but also the Hobbit being made, and …
Robert Silverberg. He’s a top SF writer and he’s prolific. But he’s 78 and he’s slowing down. So figure if you restore a couple of extra decades to him, we’ll get a bunch of good SF novels out of it.
Pratchett was my first thought on reading the title, too. Then I thought “Well, only if it gives twenty quality years”, but I see that the OP specifically says that it undoes degenerative diseases, so that’s taken care of.
This would have been my nomination. He was supposed to do a concert here and we had tickets, but he had to cancel due to illness. One of the last men standing in the realm of classic jazz sax. Also Benny Golson for the same reason (we did get to see him).
And there’s a pretty good chance both of those guys, if you could find a cleric to cast Speak with Dead, with tell you to use the machine on Bach instead.