Lazarus Long

Disambiguation: For "Prince" Lazarus Long, please see New Utopia article

Lazarus Long is a fictional character featured in a number of science fiction novels by Robert A. Heinlein. Born in 1912 in the third generation of a long-life selective breeding experiment run by the Howard Families trust, Lazarus (whose "real" name is Woodrow Wilson Smith; he changed it later into Lazarus Long, and into many others when needed) turns out to be unusually long-lived indeed, living well over two thousand years with the aid of occasional rejuvenation treatments. He himself estimated his natural life span at two hundred and fifty.

Precisely because Lazarus possesses an unaturally long life span even for a Howard, this has inclined some to believe that his longevity arises from a spontaneous mutation. However, Heinlein himself evinces hostility toward the idea that we may explain Lazarus' longevity by invoking any deus ex machina mutation. The blurb on the back of Time Enough For Love, the second book featuring the character of Lazarus Long, suggests that Lazarus went back in time and became his own ancestor, but this never happens in any of the published books. This would be a better explanation of his longevity (since he would go back in time and give himself the longevity genes that were necessary for staying alive long enough to be able to go back in time and give himself the longevity genes), if indeed Heinlein meant for this to happen in a book that he never got around to writing.

A rugged individualist with a distrust of authority, Lazarus drifts from colony world to colony world, settling down for a few years or a few decades and leaving when things get too regimented for his taste—often just before the angry mob arrives.

The Lazarus Long set of books involve time travel, parallel dimensions, free love, voluntary incest, and a concept that Heinlein named pantheistic solipsism—the theory that universes are created by the act of imagining them so that somewhere the Land of Oz is real.

Opinion is divided among science fiction fans as to whether these late Heinlein novels are brilliant, creative and original, or simply the wish-fulfillment of a man in his second childhood.

Novels featuring Lazarus include:

• Methuselah's Children (1941)
• Time Enough for Love (1973)
• The Number of the Beast (1980)
• The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985)
• To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987)