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FIXED PERIOD by Anthony Trollope
Sep. 26th, 2013 02:43 amWould you think Anthony Trollope wrote about steampunk cricket in the 1980s?
Trollope experiments with speculative fiction in A MODEST PROPOSAL's vein. Let's eat Grandpa - or at least, let's kill Grandpa or Grandma when they're sixty-seven-and-a-half. Trollope was about sixty-seven at the time it was published, which is a rather interesting fact.
The novel is set in 1980, in the fictional land of Britannula (which began as a Crown colony). Peope ride steam-tricycles to get about. Capital punishment is outlawed. They still play cricket but it's a sort of steampunk version. The narrator is one President John Neverbend, and his friend Crasweller is about to be the first to meet the Fixed Period law.
The debate of euthanasia continues today, although the extreme form here is exaggerated fiction (thankfully so). Trollope earns a point for successful predictions with the abolishment of the death penalty in Britannula, which was the case in many Western countries by 1980. He deserves another presciency point for cricket - the cricket matches between England and its former dominions are still going on today. He was also pretty close to the expected British population size, as well as advanced refridgeration techniques for transporting fruit, mobile phones, machine transcriptions of speech, and weapons of mass destruction. He's not so prescient about his prediction of a Great Britain + France against Russia + America war, though! The worldbuilding also seriously underestimates the effect of the feminist movements of Trollope's day. As an interesting side note, Trollope also includes forcible tattoos on babies in his worldbulding that show the date of birth - it's possible to see an echo with Nazi tattoos of prisoners, although of course this wasn't in the writer's mind.
Trollope also tries to explore the mindset of one who commits atrocities and attempts to justify themselves; it's almost an early example of the banality of evil. This novel is ultimately more about capital punishment than it is about euthanasia. It comes across as a strong argument against all executions of living beings who wish to live--and who are doomed to wait for state-enforced death. There are many (too many, in the sense that too many people are executed) articles about life on death row. The writing comes across as very much on the Crasweller side of fearing a state-ordained execution at a healthy and active sixty-seven-and-a-half. The possibility of indignities of old age such as those described by Terry Pratchett are mentioned in the novel, but lack the vivacity of the arguments against. It seems that this story is against capital punishment and the particular concept of state execution at an arbitrary age; more complex questions of euthanasia are beyond the scope of this book.
(A very recent article on the value of long lives to human development makes an intriguing supplementary read to this book.)
It would be interesting to read Trollope on some of the atrocities of his day in a real setting; some of his novels touch briefly on Africa and Australia, but I can't recall reading anything similar to what his mother wrote about slaves in the United States.
The ending seems weak and abrupt, but by that time the novel has already served the purpose it wished to serve. Trollope making this experiment by writing a story like this is amazing and worthy of admiration.
I must comment that the steampunk cricket subplot occupies a significant and vital portion of the novel.
Trollope experiments with speculative fiction in A MODEST PROPOSAL's vein. Let's eat Grandpa - or at least, let's kill Grandpa or Grandma when they're sixty-seven-and-a-half. Trollope was about sixty-seven at the time it was published, which is a rather interesting fact.
The novel is set in 1980, in the fictional land of Britannula (which began as a Crown colony). Peope ride steam-tricycles to get about. Capital punishment is outlawed. They still play cricket but it's a sort of steampunk version. The narrator is one President John Neverbend, and his friend Crasweller is about to be the first to meet the Fixed Period law.
The debate of euthanasia continues today, although the extreme form here is exaggerated fiction (thankfully so). Trollope earns a point for successful predictions with the abolishment of the death penalty in Britannula, which was the case in many Western countries by 1980. He deserves another presciency point for cricket - the cricket matches between England and its former dominions are still going on today. He was also pretty close to the expected British population size, as well as advanced refridgeration techniques for transporting fruit, mobile phones, machine transcriptions of speech, and weapons of mass destruction. He's not so prescient about his prediction of a Great Britain + France against Russia + America war, though! The worldbuilding also seriously underestimates the effect of the feminist movements of Trollope's day. As an interesting side note, Trollope also includes forcible tattoos on babies in his worldbulding that show the date of birth - it's possible to see an echo with Nazi tattoos of prisoners, although of course this wasn't in the writer's mind.
Trollope also tries to explore the mindset of one who commits atrocities and attempts to justify themselves; it's almost an early example of the banality of evil. This novel is ultimately more about capital punishment than it is about euthanasia. It comes across as a strong argument against all executions of living beings who wish to live--and who are doomed to wait for state-enforced death. There are many (too many, in the sense that too many people are executed) articles about life on death row. The writing comes across as very much on the Crasweller side of fearing a state-ordained execution at a healthy and active sixty-seven-and-a-half. The possibility of indignities of old age such as those described by Terry Pratchett are mentioned in the novel, but lack the vivacity of the arguments against. It seems that this story is against capital punishment and the particular concept of state execution at an arbitrary age; more complex questions of euthanasia are beyond the scope of this book.
(A very recent article on the value of long lives to human development makes an intriguing supplementary read to this book.)
It would be interesting to read Trollope on some of the atrocities of his day in a real setting; some of his novels touch briefly on Africa and Australia, but I can't recall reading anything similar to what his mother wrote about slaves in the United States.
The ending seems weak and abrupt, but by that time the novel has already served the purpose it wished to serve. Trollope making this experiment by writing a story like this is amazing and worthy of admiration.
I must comment that the steampunk cricket subplot occupies a significant and vital portion of the novel.
