Immortal: Short Novels of the Transhuman Future. Ed. Jack Dann (Harper & Row, New York, $9.95). Anticipations: Eight New Stories. Ed. Christopher Priest (Scribner's, New York, $8.95). Ursula K. Le Guin's Science Fiction Writing Workshop: The Altered I. Ed. Lee Harding (Berkley, New York, $3.95). A Place Beyond Man. Cary Neeper (Dell, New York, $1.50)

Immortality – like death – is one of the great unrealizables, powerful in artists' hands not because they are capable of saying anything about it, but because they can use it to say so much about everything else. Probably the only interesting use of the subject can be made by the religious mystics, since they use immortality as a metaphor for transcendence; thus in science fiction we have Shaw's “Ancients” (experienced, serious, memory-reliant, detached from the body) and Stapledon's “Last Men” (playful, wild, physical, paradoxical, immediate, sensuous). Without the mysticism and hence the belief in progress-as-transcendence, extrapolating from old age results not in Shaw's wonderful Ancients but in Swift's horrible Struldbrugs, while the neoteny of the Last Men decays to silly hedonism: the immortal as game-player.

In Immortal editor Dann has assembled four novellas in which immortality (conceived differently by each author) is neither transcendent nor particularly appealing – therefore making R. C. W. Ettinger's technophile introduction look even odder than it is. Ettinger says that human nature is radically imperfect and should be improved, but if so, are not the improvements suggested to us by the radically imperfect judgment of our radically imperfect natures also radically imperfect? Ettinger thinks not, nor does he answer the question of who the “we” is who will judge what constitutes improvement (Gene Wolfe does in “The Doctor of Death Island” and the answer is a chilling one). Ettinger does agree with one of the stories; both he and George Zebrowski (“Transfigured Night”) disapprove of an immortality devoted to immediate sensation in the interests of wish-fulfillment. Zebrowski tries hard to avoid the fallacy of imitative form (as one of his characters comments, without the refractoriness of reality, wishfulfillment can get pretty dull) but he can only up the ante by luridness and violence, since the story is without real conflict. The best line in it is a visiting alien's dry comment, “I am glad that you are not mobile.” There are signs also that attempting to make meaningless events matter has pushed the author into forcing the tone;…