The Live-Forever Machine
1990
First Published
3.37
Average Rating
252
Number of Pages
This is Kenneth Oppel’s debut young adult novel, greeted with great reviews when it was first published. The story of 14-year-old Eric, who witnesses a strange confrontation in the city museum between an aged curator and an eerily intense young man, The Live-Forever Machine immediately transports the reader into an ancient, centuries-old conflict. Alexander, guardian of the secret of immortality, only wants to preserve the past. His nemesis, Coil, will do anything to destroy it. Within the eerie museum, and deep below it in the city’s subterranean depths, Eric becomes the pawn in a life-or-death struggle for control over the Live-Forever Machine. A tautly written thriller, The Live-Forever Machine is an unputdownable read.
Avg Rating
3.37
Number of Ratings
185
5 STARS
13%
4 STARS
29%
3 STARS
43%
2 STARS
12%
1 STARS
3%
goodreads
Author
Kenneth Oppel
Author · 34 books
I was born in 1967 in Port Alberni, a mill town on Vancouver Island, British Columbia but spent the bulk of my childhood in Victoria, B.C. and on the opposite coast, in Halifax, Nova Scotia...At around twelve I decided I wanted to be a writer (this came after deciding I wanted to be a scientist, and then an architect). I started out writing sci-fi epics (my Star Wars phase) then went on to swords and sorcery tales (my Dungeons and Dragons phase) and then, during the summer holiday when I was fourteen, started on a humorous story about a boy addicted to video games (written, of course, during my video game phase). It turned out to be quite a long story, really a short novel, and I rewrote it the next summer. We had a family friend who knew Roald Dahl - one of my favourite authors - and this friend offered to show Dahl my story. I was paralysed with excitement. I never heard back from Roald Dahl directly, but he read my story, and liked it enough to pass on to his own literary agent. I got a letter from them, saying they wanted to take me on, and try to sell my story. And they did.
