Immortality in Fiction, from Ancient Greece to the far future

On The Iliad, 17,776, and more

Exploring Life through the Written Word

Dear friends,

Denise S. Robbins

is an author from Madison, Wisconsin. Her stories have been published in literary journals including The Barcelona Review, Gulf Coast, and many more. She contacted me in March and asked if I would be interested in reading an advance copy of her debut novel. I receive numerous queries of this type, and, as the books vary in quality, I am always honest about my impressions, refusing to give a great review for a book I didn’t enjoy. I also wasn’t sure how much time I would have to read a book by a debut author while trying to write my publication and lead a weekly book club through Homer’s classics.

To say I was pleasantly surprised would be an understatement. What Robbins' opening pages revealed was something unexpected—genuine originality in a genre crowded with familiar tropes and recycled concepts. Robbins accomplished something significant here—creating a work that announces the arrival of a distinctive voice while delivering a story that satisfies on its own terms. This represents exactly the kind of debut novel that makes me want to take a break from the back list. Her debut novel, The Unmapping , was published in June 2025 from Mareas at Bindery Books.

Denise reached out again over the summer when I mentioned I was looking for anyone interested in writing a guest post. I was excited that she chose to write about The Iliad as something of a companion piece to my year-long endeavor to bring Homer’s classic works to the masses. What follows is an exquisite essay on how life and literature are so intimately intertwined.

The day I moved to Wisconsin, I found an empty bald eagle nest in the prairie near my house. Days later, the nest was occupied by a parental unit, presumably sitting atop an unseeable egg. I watched through binoculars over the proceeding weeks and months as the egg became a fledgling and eventually a brown teenager that reared its head above the border with a mouth open wide for food and wings that wanted to fly. By this point, hundreds of sandhill cranes had returned to the area, walking gracefully across quiet streets followed by their long-legged chicks. The reason my husband and I moved to Madison, by the way, was to start a family. This was two Februarys ago; it was cold. In March and April, it remained cold. Yet we were happy; we were surrounded by birds starting families of their own. I’ve always considered rare bird sightings to be positive omens, and so the bald eagle’s nest, the cranes, the occasional owl—it all felt like more than just a good omen: it felt like fate.

My experience with Greek mythology and history is scattered and incomplete, but even I know that Fate is a constant theme. Fate and also Gods and the intersection between the two, with mortals constantly trying to appease and understand the gods in order to secure a better fate. They read signs from an ill wind, a poor current, a sick goat, hiring oracles left and right to tell them how to fix plagues and carry on their legacy. One simple translation is that people were trying to understand the unknown and find meaning in nature’s randomness. I understand the desire to search for meaning, especially when it comes to the unknown. And back then, so much was unknown. So they read the signs wherever they could be found. The length of a snake dictated the duration of the Trojan war. Decisions were made by casting lots. And there were birds. Ravens and crows and doves and owls and eagles. Especially eagles, the favorite omen of all-powerful Zeus.

I’ve been drifting towards the Classics for a few years now, reading mythologies and tragedies and histories without much rhyme or reason. Picking up and putting down The Odyssey. Picking it up again, putting it down again. I spent two years reading about Ancient Roman history, but even then always came back to Greeks. This year, 2025, is when I finally read the Iliad. Partially because I read the contemporary remake The Song of Achilles for a book club, partially due to the readalong in this very newsletter. But first I want to talk about a different story. I want to talk about 17,776.

The speculative novella 17,776 is, on its face, nothing like The Iliad. It is no oral tome carried down throughout generations; it is an internet website filled with clickables and videos and interactive graphics. It is not about humans dying; it is about humans living forever. It doesn’t even read like a novella at first. Open the link on the sports news website SB Nation and you’ll find an average-looking article titled “What Football Will Look Like In The Future.” Scroll down four times and the letters of the article will grow and jumble until the screen is taken over by blackness. The blackness will be briefly replaced with a nonsensical time and date. Then a long, empty calendar, with text on one date. "Nine? Can you hear me? ... I understand that you might be afraid." And an answer two days later: "Is that my name? Are you calling me Nine?" Scroll and scroll and scroll and you will find the dates filled with “Nine”’s pleas for answers. One year later, an answer arrives.

What follows is the unspooling of a fascinating future narrated by three artificially intelligent satellites, including the aforementioned “Nine.” They discuss an Earth where humans have not so much discovered immortality as had it thrust upon them with little wish or explanation. With their new immortality-inducing nanotechnology, not only do the people not die, they don’t get sick or hurt. They also can’t have children and they lose interest in space exploration. Humans have solved all their problems, but find themselves floating, with nothing left to solve. Thousands of years pass in a stasis, a malaise. The story unravels beautifully in a way that lets you grasp the feeling of eternal time. It is a story, after all, about immortality.

But through this all, the people on this earth play football. The games get bigger and weirder, spanning states and oceans. They expand beyond football, as well, with games like a global version of “500” (also known as “Jackpot,” where someone throws a ball, assigns a value, and everyone else tries to catch it) and a worldwide parasocial relationship with a 15,000 year old lightbulb. But football remains at the core, the spirit of the game, of game-ness in general. When there is no limit to time, there is no limit to how far these games can go. The only limits are self-imposed.

Once I realized this story was about immortality, I began thinking about Greek mythology. The humans in this story, after all, had been elevated into gods. And what are the gods to do with themselves and all their immortal time?

What do the Greek gods do? Play with the fate of humans as if they were playing a game of football. Nowhere does this feel more true than in The Iliad. In this story of Trojans against Akhaians, the gods have their favored players. Both sides are trying to get past the defensive lines and into the endzone. It is a game that the gods all, in a way, realize doesn’t matter. They know how it will end. Troy will fall; many of their beloved humans will die.

Do they realize that it is also their own fate at hand? The Greek gods requested faith and devotion from mortals—perhaps because they knew that without this, they would become obsolete. Soon, the days of myth would end and the days of philosophy would begin. The Trojan War would lead to the end of the Bronze Age and eventual end of the gods. A quest for truth would follow. Socrates, the father of modern philosophy, sentenced to death for his impiety. His followers who would ask the same questions. No, the gods themselves are just as subject to Fate as the mortals they play with. A constant refrain throughout The Iliad is Zeus urging the other gods not to interfere, to let Fate play out as it will (and then he interferes anyway).

This narrative is winding around because the way I read these two books converged and combined and also flowed in with my prior and future reading. I wanted to read The Iliad for the same reason I actively enjoy reading The Bible every Saturday: to engage with something eternal. Or as close to eternal as we can get. To me that is what divinity means. I grew up Jewish, let it go for a while, and brought it back. Now we read scripture every Saturday, repeating the cycle every year. My favorite is the story of Jacob wrestling with an angel, which is also somehow God, and winning. I think it’s important to engage with the divine and wrestle with it, whatever shape that may take, even if I can never come up with a good ‘why.’ Why does it matter that I should read The Iliad? Because it does. Because it’s mattered to millions of people over thousands of years and I am taking my place in history by picking it up and reading it myself. Is it like playing a game of football? A divergence to pass the time until my inevitable death? Maybe, but it feels useful all the same. Why? What’s the good that can come out of reading The Iliad? Really, why should anyone read it?

I find it almost impossible to explain.

I could tell you the way the first line took me away. Anger be now your song, immortal one, Akhilleus’ anger, doomed and ruinous. (Fitzgerald translation). The way I went into it expecting a story about gods and Fate but discovered a story about unshackled emotion.

Or I could tell you about grief for Patroclus, how touched I was when Achilles reached out for his ghost but he was not there. And how this grief brought every other man on the battlefield to tears—not for Patroclus, I don’t think, but for their own dead, the way they hadn’t been allowed to mourn or stop fighting until now.

Or the challenge of living in a world of unknowns, at the whims of the gods, and how the gods themselves wrestle with fate.

Maybe it was the sheer joy of the language, even, yes, the repetition and overdone metaphors. A hundred Greeks and Trojans are compared to lions. Achilles himself is a lion, to be sure, but also a forest fire and a wolf and an eagle too.

Or I could tell you about a dozen other things that made me put the book down and sit there in awe.

But today I’m talking about immortality. Whereas in 17,776, humans struggle with the endlessness of life, in The Iliad, they struggle with its fleeting nature—and because of this, perhaps ironically, they think more deeply about what immortality means. They always have an eye on the future beyond them. Everything they do is to be mentioned in songs. Matthew has written here about the book’s infamous long, drudging passages of names and formations: “One of the primary purposes of naming the slain is to give them a form of immortality. By including their names, Homer ensures that these warriors, no matter how minor their roles in the narrative, are remembered.” Nobody knows who they were, and they all died young, but we are still repeating their names when we reread this immortal story.

What will happen after you die? I started writing fiction as a way to transcend mortality, wanting to write something that will live beyond me. These days, I no longer consider writing a way to achieve immortality so much as a way to make life bigger while it is lived. But I know the odds of my stories living beyond me are nil to none. I know the true path to immortality, and that’s what the characters of 17,776 don’t have and don’t know how to miss: children.

As briefly mentioned above, in this story, there are no children, and every human is infertile. I’m guessing this was a simple necessity to write a story about a world with no problems: if nobody is dying, and more people are being born, in enough time, overpopulation will be a very big problem. So, to simplify it: no children. So I don’t think this was intended to be a story about infertility. And yet. There is a cynicism to the story. A quiet nihilism behind everything.

And then there is this scene, about halfway through the story, where the space probes are discussing a lawn by an office park. They call it the “forgotten lawn.” It was laid down in 1999, and “in the 15,777 years since, nobody has ever directly stepped on it.” They’re talking about this because they’re happy that one of the games humans play, a global version of “500,” they say, will eventually bring someone to this lawn, even if it takes 14 million years.

Then one of them asks: “You know who would've wandered out there? Just to do it?”

“Children.”

All their yearning, all their games, it’s all for, if not children, then child-ness. Without this, they are adrift in immortality. Time has no meaning. There are no milestones, there is no grief. There are no cycles of time and so time doesn’t matter. This is not just one story, but a pervasive current idea about immortality. Modern culture has torn down the gods and myths. So the writer of this story made humans into gods. And yet these humans are still human. They are bored out of their minds. The sequel to 17,776, called 20200, is even worse. There are only increasingly complicated games. But no discovery. No heart. There was supposed to be a third story in the series, but it never came to be. There is nothing else to draw from it. The story is infertile.

How about children in The Iliad? Do they exist? Hardly. But yes. Yes and fully. Take Hector’s son, afraid of his father in his armor just before he rides out to meet his death. Take Achilles’s son, who is prophesied as necessary to overtake Troy after Achilles’s doom.

And take Thetis, Achilles’s mother, who would do anything for her son, even as she knows his time is limited. She even fits him with armor even though she knows it means he will ride out in it to his death.

The point of something as big and all-encompassing as The Iliad is you can read it a thousand different ways and all are correct. I am aware that most people won’t think that this book is about children. Yet in my life, right now, fertility is all I can think about. Specifically, the lack thereof. Several years of pain and frustration have led to the conclusion that I may not be able to bear children. A few surgeries from now, we will flip a coin. Heads leads to life. Tails means a long, painful, expensive road with someone else’s womb. Still, I am ready to fight for these children who don’t yet exist. To me they are as real as the gods, as real as any story I’ve ever read. Even if they are still years away.

If nothing else, books like The Iliad can make you feel the expanse of time and how quickly your own life moves in comparison. This is a comforting thought on the days where each hour feels like an eternity. Maybe it will be less comforting the closer I get to my twilight years. In the meantime, some days are hard. Some days life can feel like a tragedy. On these days it helps to know I am not alone. This doesn’t mean I think the world is tragic or that I want it to be that way. Only that it is filled with tragedy, and we’re still here. After thousands of years, Achilles stays the same.

Homer writes in the Iliad, a voice from the gods: “Of all the creatures that breathe and move on earth none is to be more pitied than a man.” Sometimes I have a deep and desperate urge for pity. This is a horrible thing to desire and I pity myself even more for it. But the gods can be wrong. This sentence is one opinion, swiftly disproved by the rest of the story. Achilles is a man and I am Achilles. I am a lion, a bull, a forest fire, burning with anger because I’m too in love and so much emotion cannot be easily contained.

Sometimes I walk outside and still feel lucky. The local sandhill cranes have adopted a baby goose. A family of robins built a nest on our front door. There are red-winged blackbirds everywhere, swooping down to attack any human who gets too close to their nest. And soon the sandhill cranes will migrate en masse. Flocks of trumpeter swans will come through. I am surrounded by godly things and I feel lucky, but also, I chose to be here, and I set up two bird feeders, so can it really be called luck?

I finished The Iliad in mid-July. The next week, I started up—once again—with The Odyssey. This time, I was taken away immediately. No more picking it up and putting it down. I read the first chapter. Then I went to the doctor. I got some bad news. Just the ordinary bad news; my life is filled with bad news, but it still was painful and it made me want to hide. Instead I got in the car with my husband and, and as he drove through the countryside, I read the next chapter aloud. The world was passing by, or were we passing by the world? The cranes and blackbirds and even the common sparrow could not keep up. Earlier this year I read a story about people who lost everything. Now I’m reading one about one man getting it back. I think about what that means, to lose everything. I realize I am willing to give everything I have. I’m not afraid. Life is a journey and I’m still at the beginning.

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Click this link to purchase a copy of Denise’s book: The Unmapping

You can read more of Denise’s wonderful writing at her publication.

And find more of her content at https://denisesrobbins.com/

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Until next time,