Scarborough (Harold E.) The Immortals

London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1924.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.

A Russian scientist invents a serum conferring immortality on selected recipients, and a young couple are left to decide whether it should be used; the protagonist’s advocacy of the drug is brought to an end when the Wandering Jew appears and describes the cost of being unable to die. Harold E. Scarborough (1897–1935) was an American journalist and author resident in Britain from 1920, and this is the title for which he is remembered in science fiction. The book belongs to a distinct and long-running line of argument within the genre – that immortality would produce social sterility – running from Walter Besant’s The Inner House (1888) through Martin Swayne’s The Blue Germ (1918) and forward to Huxley’s After Many a Summer (1939), and the Wandering Jew device places it equally in the Gothic tradition of Godwin’s St Leon, Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and Mary Shelley’s The Mortal Immortal. Noticed by Bleiler in Science-Fiction: The Early Years and Locke’s A Spectrum of Fantasy. Published simultaneously in New York by D. Appleton.