Fountains of Youth in Literature.
By Author:
- Robert A. Heinlein:
- In his Future History series, medical rejuvenation therapy works to reverse the aging process through a variety of techniques, from swapping the body's entire blood supply to cloned tissue transplants. In extreme cases, a human at near-death can be completely rebuilt to look and feel twenty years old again, complete with a fresh brain that's had the memories from the old one copied into it. This plus a program of applied eugenics designed to extend the natural lifespan has resulted in a subrace of near-immortals, of whom Lazarus Long (featured in Time Enough for Love and The Number of the Beast) is by far the oldest.
- Glory Road, while set in a different continuity than the Future History series, also features medical rejuvenation, known on Center as "Long Life" treatment.
By Title:
- In the Blackcollar books by Timothy Zahn, a drug called Idunine can reverse many of the effects of aging. In fact, taking heavy doses of it is once used to disguise several characters, as they now look much younger.
- Willy Wonka invented Wonka-Vite, an invention that makes people younger. It's used in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator on Charlie's three still-bedridden grandparents. Unfortunately, they don't listen to his instructions and take too many — one pill takes 20 years off, and each takes four pills. That renders two of them babies, and since Grandma Georgina was seventy-eight and thus becomes negative two years old, her spirit winds up in the dreary Minusland. Luckily, Mr. Wonka also created a Rapid Aging counterpart, Vita-Wonk...
- A literal fountain drives the plot of Dirge for Prester John. It's nothing like what the characters expected it to be, but it does the trick.
- Terry Pratchett's Discworld:
- In The Last Continent, combined with Overnight Age-Up, the wizards travel to a place (Fourecks), where, due to morphic instability, Ponder Stibbons becomes an eighty-year-old, and the Dean becomes a thirteen-year-old. And then there's Mrs. Whitlow...It wears off within a few minutes.
- In Eric Ponce da Quirm is an old man who's spent his entire life searching for the Fountain of Youth. Rincewind doesn't quite have the nerve to ask him whether it would have been better to just have a life in the first place. When they later encounter him in Hell, they learn that he did find it, but there's one thing all the legends forgot to mention about the water of the fountain of youth - boil it first.
- Due to a quirk in their physiology, the Cheela in Dragon's Egg can rejuvenate. Under particular conditions, when their body has been battered enough, it will revert to the plant the Cheela evolved from and heal itself, taking the best part of a lifetimenote in the process. Then the plant turns back into a Cheela in its prime. In the sequel, Starquake, this very rare and risky process has been harnessed and rejuvenation machines are in use.
- In The Fourteenth Goldfish, Ellie's grandfather, Melvin, discovers a new species of jellyfish that he dubs "T. Melvinus". After using an extract from it to create a new serum and injecting it into himself, his body physically reverts from 75 to 13.
- In Gilded Latten Bones, the King of Karenta is discovered to be shielding a trio of necromancers who have been keeping him and themselves unnaturally young. Unlike most examples, users of this age-reversal effect retain their gray hair, so they must wear wigs to suit their youthful bodies.
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: During the battle of the Department of Mysteries, a Death Eater's head turns into that of a baby when he falls into a magical clock.
- The Horrible Bag of Terrible Things: After Zenith realizes Apogee was chosen for the Wurm's ritual because she's "the One of Age", without thinking, he erases the "-teen" in the sentence "Zenith Malestrom has a fourteen-year-old sister named Apogee" on the magic chalkboard, turning Apogee into a four-year-old. Apogee, once the responsible big sibling, isn't happy with this at all, especially after Zenith loses the chalkboard, sticking her like this for the foreseeable future.
- In Diana Wynne Jones' House of Many Ways, the grown wizard Howl became the Deliberately Cute Child Twinkle partly as a disguise and partly (he said) because he felt he deserved a better childhood than the one he'd actually had.
- Inkmistress: Raisa uses her absorbed energy to make herself look much younger (she's a very old woman).
- In the Instrumentality Of Mankind stories and novels, the source of both the longevity of the citizens of the Instrumentality, and the vast wealth of Norstrilla, is the Santaclara drug (called 'stroon' in its raw form), which comes from their diseased, massively oversized sheep.
- The Rapture becomes this for older Christians in the Left Behind book series when they receive their glorified bodies, while for children and teenagers it brings them up to the same age level as the adult believers. At the end of the Millennium, even the longest-lived naturals (who are at that point all believers) are restored to the prime of their youth.
- In The Mermaid Chronicles, the lost city of Atlantis has a fountain of youth that, when activated, not only restores anyone who drinks from it to perfect health but also repairs all the damage done to the city by the dragon kings over the millennia.
- The Misenchanted Sword: Iridith gives Valder eternal youth with a spell in the book's finale to solve issues he has with his enchanted sword. She also has it herself.
- In Mistborn: The Original Trilogy, The Lord Ruler pulls this off by being both an Allomancer and a Feruchemist. To elaborate, Feruchemists can store youth in the metal atium, which causes them to look and feel older than they really are for a time in exchange for allowing them to look and feel younger than they really are for the same amount of time later on. Allomancers can "burn", or Allomantically metabolize, various metals to gain specific superpowers: tin grants Super-Senses, brass allows you to dampen someone's emotions, etc. The Lord Ruler discovered that if you burn Feruchemically charged metal you get back ten times the Feruchemical charge you put in. Effectively, the Lord Ruler had an infinite supply of youth.
- However, the atium he needed to burn needed to be charged with his youth, not someone else's. This is how the trick was kept under wraps for as long as it was - there were no Allomancers who were also Feruchemists besides the Lord Ruler who could stumble upon it. (Vin actually burned an allied Feruchemist's "metalmind," just to see what would happen, and could see but not access the power it gave off.)
- Of Fire and Stars: Queen Invasya has lived for centuries, while only looking in her forties at most due to magic.
- Percy Jackson and the Olympians: In The Chalice of the Gods, Percy, Annabeth and Grover encounter Hebe, the goddess of youth, who unsurprisingly has this as one of her godly powers. In the mortal world she runs a store called "Hebe Jeebies" which provides toys, food, games, etc. from visitors' childhoods, and a prolonged stay will slowly induce actual age regression (one of the managers is sixty-five but looks nine). When the trio accidentally offend her, Hebe regresses them to eight-year-olds, both physically and mentally - they retain their memories and know that they're actually teenagers but find themselves acting and feeling more like their apparent ages, Percy in particular struggling with how much harder his ADHD hits him without his years of learning to manage it better. Hebe herself becomes a victim of this due to her insistence on being the (physically) youngest person in a room: the trio get her in a room with a young chick from among her sacred hens, and she turns into an infant, after which they are able to negotiate returning to their proper ages.
- Frank Stockton's The Queen's Museum and Other Fanciful Tales, short story "Old Pipes and the Dryad". A dryad is the spirit of a tree, which takes human form. Each time one of them kisses a human being, the human's age is reduced by ten years. If done enough times, the person will become young again.
- The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System: Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong: In the Return to Childhood extra, Luo Binghe qi deviates and is temporarily turned into a child. Shenangians are had when people mistake the now young Luo Binghe as Luo Binghe and Shen Qingqiu's love child, or when Luo Binghe tries to go on his usual activities.
- In Shadow of the Conqueror, jumping over the edge of Tellos and passing the bottom edge of the universe normally loops you back to the top like a game of asteroids, but if you're physically touching either a piece of darkstone or sunstone when you reach that point, you instead just die. Daylen, in an attempt to commit suicide, does this while holding one of each, which turned out to have quite a different effect, namely granting him a form of Lightbinding magic, as well as reversing his physical age to about 17. The only explanation for this de-ageing ever offered comes from Daylen himself, who basically just shrugs and says "I dunno, Divine Intervention?"
- K.H. Metzger's Skye Sparkler is all about this. A woman in her thirties designs a little-girl superhero character and subsequently, permanently becomes her.
- The carousel in Something Wicked This Way Comes can function as either this or as an Overnight Age-Up, depending on whether it runs backwards or forwards. Carnival co-owner Cooger uses it to go incognito as a preteen boy.
- This is the main premise of The Summer I Shrank My Grandmother. Nelly Brown finds an old chemistry set while visiting her grandmother for the summer, and manages to mix up a formula that will make her grandmother young again. Unfortunately, she continues to get younger with each passing day, so Nelly has to find a way to reverse the effects of her formula before her grandmother de-ages out of existence.
- Sword of Truth: There's a spell on the Palace of Prophets which makes people inside age much slower than normal, so they'll live for centuries, as wizards there need that much time for learning magic.
- In Tales of Kolmar, lansip leaves and fruit, very difficult to get to and already a potent Panacea, can be distilled into a liquor which can make the drinker younger. There's a tale about an elderly merchant who was found after drinking an overdose, with the body of someone in his twenties. Berys is much more careful with his supply, taking a little at a time and prudently using makeup to make himself still look old, and arrives at mid-twenties without dying of it.
- In The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke, there is an example of this trope in the form of the elderly Conte and Contessa, who use a magical merry-go-round to become children again.
- Third Time Lucky: And Other Stories of the Most Powerful Wizard in the World:
- Magdelene keeps herself young (about forty) with magic, and easily could do the same for other people.
- In "Third Time Lucky" too Magdelene turns her son back into a baby after he tries to kill her.
- In "And Who Is Joah?" Magdelene starts teaching Joah to turn parts of herself younger or older first thing. After being rescued, she's managed it.
- The Thora book The Incredible Crystals focuses on crystals that can reverse aging. Madame Pong first discovers the effect when her geriatric pug eats a crystal and his many health problems vanish in seconds. Now the Deep Breath Hotel and Spa, which she owns, has become extremely wealthy by marketing crystal-studded tubs. Unfortunately, the crystals can have a number of side effects - Bruce and Adelaide Ferguson, who used the crystals as a fertility treatment after waiting too long to have a child, have lost all their hair and suffer from a constant sense of deja vu, while Mr Walters becomes briefly obsessed with health to the exclusion of all else.
- Villains by Necessity: Kaylana is over a hundred and fifty years old, though druid magic stopped her from aging so that she looks like a young woman still.
- On one of the unknown islands visited by Máel Dúin and his companions in the medieval Irish Voyage of Máel Dúin, the voyagers observe a giant bird rejuvenating itself by bathing in a magical lake. Diuran the Rhymer tries it too and emerges permanently rejuvenated.
- The Wheel of Time: Aes Sedai stop aging once they have mastered use of the One Power, which lets them live for centuries before finally dying. They are repeatedly described as having ageless faces.
