I’m reading BloodAngel by Justine Musk, and I’ve yet again encounted a typical horror-fantasy character: the wealthy immortal. This character goes so far as to say that it’s hard to live centuries without acquiring wealth.
But is it true?
What if someone who was really bad a money - bad enough that they spent their life living from paycheck to paycheck - discovered that they couldn’t die? Would the centuries improve their ability to manage money?
Are there any examples in books/movie/tv of immortals that stay very poor throughout the ages? Not ones that screw up like Lestat and end up poor for a while, or don’t care much about money like Angel and Spike, but ones that never do get ahead and are always struggling to feed, clothe and house themselves? FTR, not just vampires, any immortals will do.
Hob Gadling, in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics/graphic novels, goes through periods flush with wealth and periods of destitute poverty. At one point, while wealthy he meets another immortal who is rather down on his luck, and helps him out (presumably, their little community of immortals looks after its own).
Just as a counter-point, I’d like to offer Captain Julius Vanderdecken and crew, who live a hand-to-mouth, isolated existance even though Vanderdecken owns the world. Sorta.
Also in the Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman, Mad Hettie is a homeless woman, and seemingly insane. I do forget if she’s a proper immortal or just a magical type fallen on hard times.
Spoiler for the novel Flying Dutch, elaborating on the above:
He had a small sum of money that he had in a British bank c. 15th century; when he revisits the mainland he discovers that the small sum, the paltry interest rate, and the intervening 500 years conspired to make him the world’s richest man, so rich that paying off all the interest would have bankrupted the economy of the entire world. So if you are an immortal just stash some money away in a Swiss bank, wait 100 years, collect the interest rinse repeat.
I use to read the Casca* books. In these, over the centuries, he would go through cycles of wealth and poverty.
In the Amber Series by Zelazny, some of the immortals were not rich. I know there are many other examples.
Jim
The Eternal Mercenary (Casca, No. 1): Books: Barry Sadler
Basically he was the Centurian that pierced Jesus’ side and was cursed with living until Judgement day.
One of Glen Cooks Nightside books features a fallen god who lost all his worshipers and lives in a cardboard box.
Sabrehagen’s Thorn has half vampires, people who made the transition to vampire halfway, and wander the country homeless. They’re too mentally screwed up for anything else.
And at least one of the times he’s destitute, it’s because he lingered too long in one region, the locals decided he was a witch, and his home was stormed with the proverbial torches and pitchforks.
Which seems to suggest that occasional poverty may be a function of being immortal.
Cassidy from the comic book Preacher, which will soon be an HBO series is constantly down on his luck because he spends lavishly when he has it. Part of his character is that he never gained any sort of transcendental wisdom by being immortal, even though you’d think someone would figure some things out in 90 years.
I think that if an immortal is of average intelligence, there is no way they can stay poor. In Highlander he got rich by just holding on to some nice things for a few hundred years. Antiques dealer is the ideal job because you will know periods by virtue of having lived through them.
As it is, I am not very good with money, but I do know that all it really takes is keeping your books in order if you want to make some cash. An immortal would know the lay of the land and have pretty good people skills, or at least decent ones. An immortal would have to be seriously deficient in some capacity not to know how to make money. Ending up destitute because you didn’t focus on money is one thing, but not being able to just hop into some cash in a pinch is another. Think of all the skills you would develop over the years just by being alive.
If I were immortal I’d learn a new trade every few years. Though, if I figured out I was immortal I’d probably work on setting up a corporation and getting some investments together so that I could always have money.
I remember one short story written about a perpetually dead-broke immortal. It’s been a few years and I don’t remember the title anymore, but it was something like “The other side of compound interest”. Maybe someone else here has seen and remembers it.
The premise was that this guy fell into the poverty trap - bad credit, high-interest loans, etc - and didn’t figure out that he was immortal until his childhood friends were well into middle age and he was still in great, mid-thirties shape, albeit under an unhealthy mountain of debt. He was an honest sort and didn’t want to just walk out on a loan and wait for his creditors to write it off, so he more or less spent his entire existence paying off the interest. Every time he put a significant dent in the principle, something would come along and add a big chunk back onto it.
Corporations can be more or less immortal, too, and the interest rates are weighted in their favor.
Jules Duchon, the hero of Andrew Fox’s Fat White Vampire Blues leads a lower middle class existence. The title blurb describes his as “He’s undead, overweight, and can’t get a date”.
