This week I read Zelazny’s Lord of Light for about the fourth time; and got to thinking about faces.
The story is set in a world where it is routine to transfer one’s soul every forty or fifty years into a fresh body bought from the vats. Since the new body is not a clone of the old, faces become much less important than mannerisms in recognizing old friends. So what face do they put on your statue?
A talented immortal could be prominent in a variety of fields – and perhaps in conflicting causes. Some might prefer to drop an old face when they drop an old activity, just as some artists have a name for each genre in which they work. Anyway, life is change. “I remember being the man who did that and wore that face, but he’s not really me anymore.”
With Lord of Light technology, it might become customary to make the new body as a ‘child’ of the old body with a random (virtual) mate; that way you get gradual change with continuity. (I first thought the new body ought to be a full sibling to the old body’s natural children – but that would turn marriage into incest.)