[]
The Immortalists
  • Published: 23 October 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529948042
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $40.00

The Immortalists

The Death of Death and the Race for Eternal Life

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
10 Feb 2026
Hardback
23 Nov 2025
EBook
23 Oct 2025
Audiobook
23 Oct 2025
Buy from…
Apple Books Audible Google Play Kobo Libro.fm Spotify

A wild and entertaining adventure into the business of living forever. Award-winning journalist Aleks Krotoski journeys from the cult fringes to the technological heartlands to find out what it means for us all when Silicon Valley invests in the \"science\" of eternal life

Immortalism is the new frontier of Silicon Valley. By harnessing technology to \"cure\" aging and investing in cutting-edge — and often controversial — research, today’s billionaires, from Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman, are financing a new quest for eternal life: one they not only engineer, but also own and control.

There are entrepreneurs who regard humans as appliances to be fixed, and machines to be upgraded, transhumanists who want to upload consciousness to the cloud; and biohackers flogging AI-powered wellness apps. It’s a wild west of experimentation and outlandish ideologies, with the so-called science of immortalism carrying profound and dubious implications for all our social, ethical and political futures.

Award-winning journalist Aleks Krotoski journeys from the cult fringes to the technological heartlands, meeting the moguls, effective altruists, speculators and inventors who are disrupting death. This razor-sharp, powerful, and at times chilling investigation explores what it truly means to be human, asking: who really wants to live forever?
  • Published: 23 October 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529948042
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $40.00
Categories:

About the author

Aleks Krotoski

Dr Aleks Krotoski is an award-winning international broadcaster, author and academic. She has topped the ratings for the BBC and Channel 4, winning Emmy, BAFTA, Radio Academy and Royal Society awards, and has written and presented landmark technology and social science series for both radio (with BBC Radio 4’s The Artificial Human and The Digital Human) and international television (with BBC World’s The Virtual Revolution). Krotoski has held fellowships at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and received an honorary doctorate from the Open University. She currently teaches at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

AK

Praise for The Immortalists

A fascinating, deeply reported adventure among the increasingly influential figures who believe they can defeat death – and a warning not to let dreams of tech-enabled immortality stop us building a more vibrant human world here and now

Oliver Burkeman

Brilliant, painstakingly researched and altogether a wonderful read, Aleks Krotoski serves up an essential parable for our digital times

Kevin Fong

An elegant, gripping expedition into the technological apotheosis of an ancient dream. Can technology gift us immortality? In Krotoski's hands, this question is neither a promise nor a warning, but a meditation on what truly matters

Tom Chatfield

Aleks Krotoski, an award-winning broadcaster, academic, and technology reporter, has cast her eye over living for ever … Krotoski’s riveting book ends with a poignant account of the deaths of her father and stepmother. While the immortalists resist death, it will come to us all. The only thing we can try to control is how we face it

Roger Alton, Daily Mail

Fascinating … The new titans of tech wish to be as immortal as the Titans of legend. The award-wining journalist Aleks Krotoski wryly documents their antics in her new book The Immortalists … An entertaining and insightful account of those who believe the end of ageing is within our grasp

Stephen Cave, Financial Times

Eye-opening, entertaining and disturbing … [A] highly readable and meticulously researched book … Krotoski's goal is to open people’s eyes to what is going on so they can make up their own minds. She does it brilliantly

Graham Lawton, New Scientist

Life extensionists like Bryan Johnson want to live forever. But at what cost? … Aleks Krotoski, a psychologist and veteran chronicler of the tech industry, is well positioned to investigate and explain the phenomenon … as well as its social consequences

James Ball, Guardian

Aleks Krotoski’s fascinating new book penetrates deep into the heart of the Silicon Valley … it rises above the wellness rituals themselves and looks squarely at the metaphysics that animates them: the conviction that the human is decomposable into variables that computation and chemistry can optimise. The author's reporting around that conviction – its origins in grief and fear, its transmutation into a public liturgy of confidence – is utterly compelling

Justin Smith-Ruiu, New Statesman