P. J. Plauger

A classic, in a well-populated genre. Humorous, insightful, memorable.

This is a memorable story, a classic, and one of my long-term favourite stories, but I’m not giving it five stars because it’s not one of my top favourites, and I give out five stars sparingly.

I think I first read it in 1978, when I bought a copy of it in Nebula Award Stories 11, and I’ve reread it now and then, but I don’t know how many times in total. I remember the gist of it, and don’t feel the need to reread it often.

It’s the story of a very long-lived child, who was born in show more Ancient Greece and has been around ever since, using a secret recipe discovered by her long-dead father that keeps her a child forever (though she has to keep dosing herself with it regularly). It works only on children, so she can’t afford to let herself grow out of childhood, although being a child forever has significant disadvantages, as the story explains.

The fascination of the story is to see what the world might look like to someone who remains a child forever. It’s not something you’re likely to have thought about before, and it’s an interesting point of view.

It occurs to me to wonder about the ingredients of the secret recipe. She apparently manages to find them wherever she goes, and she’s wandered all the way from Ancient Greece to the modern USA, so the ingredients must be common and easy to find in all countries; which seems slightly implausible. You’d expect that a recipe for immortality might require some rather special ingredients. If plants are ingredients, I’d expect plants to have slightly different characteristics in different places and times, even if they were the same species of plant.

Over the centuries, I’d expect her to have learned important skills such as not making herself conspicuous, and staying out of trouble. But, at the beginning of the story, there she is getting into trouble and making herself conspicuous, which she could have avoided just by keeping her mouth shut.

This was a quickly written short story, and I wouldn’t expect the author to have made it safe from every possible criticism. But Melissa is a truly interesting character, and I’d like to read a longer story about her that took her more seriously and explored her life in greater depth.

This volume contains the original short story and then the same story rewritten as a stage play. The play contains some extra details and some minor changes, but I prefer it as a short story; rewriting it as a play seems a strange whim, but I suppose we all get strange whims now and then. show less