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"I do think there is a link in that in both cases, writing fiction or writing a computer program, at any given moment you're focusing on a very specific and particular thing—one word, one line of code, whatever."
- Neal Stephenson
 |
| Anti-agathic drugs | ||
| Drugs that indefinitely postpone death from old age. |
| "...What we want now is something much more direct: an antitoxin against the ageing toxin of humans. We know that the ageing toxin exists in all complex animals. We know that it's a single, specific substance, quite distinct from the poisons that cause the degenerative diseases. And we know that it can be neutralized. When your lab animals were given ascomycin, they didn't develop a single degenerative disease - but they died anyhow, at about the usual time, as if they'd been set, like a clock, at birth...
"So what we're looking for now is not an antibiotic - an anti-life drug - but an anti-agathic, an anti-death drug..." |
| From Cities in Flight,
by James Blish. Published by Avon in 1957 Additional resources -
|
The anti-agathics were part of what made interstellar space flight possible in the novel; the administrators and essential personnel of the cities received the necessary treatments.
If you'd like to learn more about it, see this absurdly detailed article at The Oikofuge.
“[…] Do you also know what an anti-agathic is?”
Compare to young blood - new blood for old from Methuselah's Children (1941) by Robert Heinlein, the
Sprung-Samser treatment from This Immortal (1966) by Roger Zelazny,
conscious retarded animation from A Race Through Time (1933) by Donald Wandrei and the
anti-Tri-D shot from The Morning of the Day They Did It (1950) by E.B. White.
...So I have to throw my hands in the air and acknowledge that Blish just seems to have plain made up some vaguely Greek-sounding names for his anti-death drugs, and evidently didn’t try to keep track of his coinings from one story to the next. But at the time of revision, Blish must have noticed that he’d used three different words in four different stories, and presumably he was aware that he had no sensible etymology to defend even his final choice. He seems to have left us a hint to that effect, in a couple of lines of dialogue he added to the ending of They Shall Have Stars when it was first published in 1956. The lines don’t appear in either of the original short stories that were combined to make the novel:
“No,” Helmuth said. “I don’t even recognize the root of the word.”
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