Methuselahʼs Children   by Robert Heinlein

A book demarked unevenly into two parts, the first being far superior to the latter.

We discover through meetings a secret society of long-lived (two to three hundred years) people living in plain site amongst the general population. They gave a subset of themselves away in a pilot 70 years ago, and, by now, the rest of the population have decided they want a piece of the action, and a new government has decided to force the secret out of the secret society by arresting everybody they know in it.

I started to really like this book because it felt like something I would (in my dreams) write myself. But while the first half felt technologically sound and politically plausible, the second became an anthropological mess.

The first part is much more interesting from a fictional science point of view, where we slowly discover the methods by which the extended-life people get by. The unbelievable part is that the whole population of 100,000 or so manage to escape the planet.

So they decide to leave the planet. All 100,000 of them. It is a clandestine operation with the help of one government official, but they pull it off and leave the Solar system in a massive stolen ship with the solitary sympathizer on board.

And so they travel to a new star which happens to have a habitable planet with intelligent life on it. But the life they meet are subservient to a master race, and the visitors find that that race is sympathetic to them. So they are whisked away to another star with another inhabited planet, hopefully more compatible. Again, it looks perfect at first sight, but they soon realize that they would much rather be back on Earth. So they go back and start to rebuild their lives on Earth.

The second part is too dated from a science point of view to have any impact today, though of course carries historical interest into the thinkings of 1950 society. It is too naïve and feels quite superficial.