I hope that the words I have written make you feel close to the characters of The Immortality Thief, if only for a little while. (And given that the ship is full of monsters, that’s saying something.)Īlthough the subject matter of The Immortality Thief is far lighter, I thought of that Catullus poem often while I was writing it.

Lucky for him, then, that he does succeed at making connections-albeit to two of the most unlikely people aboard the Nameless ship.

He’s a pretty decent (though highly distractable) person, and probably doesn’t deserve to get stuck in a ship full of monsters that want him dead. But there are secrets there, terrible secrets that would change the fate of humanity, and eventually someone will come looking. He gives names to people or things that would otherwise be nameless, if only to forge a connection between them and him in the only way he knows how: with words. What is The Immortality Thief About Far off the edge of human existence, beside a dying star lies a nameless ship abandoned and hidden, lost for a millennium. He likes languages, too he picks them up like a dry sponge picks up water. That is what I love about language: the ability to connect, no matter the distance in space or time, even if translation is required. I could feel the rawness of his love and his grief, and for a minute, even though a thousand years separated us, I felt his sorrow with him. It’s one of several elegies that Catullus wrote for his deceased brother, though I didn’t know that at the time. Where is the verb, Marcus? And why is it five miles from the start of the sentence?!) By that time in the semester, I was used to Catullus’s many love poems, which range from funny to touching. It wasn’t the difficulty of the translation that brought me to tears. Read more in a letter from her below with the unlikely connection to a Latin poet. In that ship Taran Hunt hides the secret to immortality. In the furthest reaches of space, beyond what you or I might call civilisation, a nameless ship floats beside a dying star.

Taran hunt the immortality thief