In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Ciro Faienza presents Soren James's "Evolution for Immortals," with commentary by the poet.

From the poet:

The phrase “evolution for immortals” came to me using a Dada cut-up technique, and led to my wondering what that would entail—how would an immortal evolve? But I could only think of a recoiling from the horror of eternal life—a hiding from the full force of forever—and so I came up with ideas of de-evolution, a retracting into the immediacy of the flesh, shorter time-scales, memory loss, and the distractions of war/violence. Which led me to humans, and that was the final—the missing link—in the poem. Once I had this outline, I felt it would be ironic/amusing to have an impatient narrator recounting these details of immortality.

At least, that's the idealized version of the poem's evolution, in truth there were a lot of mistakes, dead-ends and fortuitousnesses along the way—like evolution itself.

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