![]() ![]() As it is, one-third of the population contributes nothing! But as the death of the first man approaches in 1980, folks start to think that what seemed great in the abstract when the law was passed back in 1950 might not be so awesome when it's your friend or dad or neighbor who's got to be killed. The narrator of The Fixed Period is John Neverbend, a social scientist and reformer who's worked out that if you euthanize everyone when they turn 67, society will be better off. (George Eliot and Charles Dickens, though, I think would be capable of writing smashing sf novels for very different reasons.) I read it for the same reason I always pick up a nineteenth-century novel: it features a scientist. It's weird to think that Anthony Trollope wrote science fiction, and there's nothing about his literary fiction that leaves me thinking he'd be particularly good at it. ![]() Now we would look back at this book and call it science fiction at the time it was published, it was considered a sort of utopian satire, like Erewhon or The Coming Race. ![]()
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