Surprising literary ventures | 3 November 2007

The Fixed Period is the most un-Trollopian thing Trollope ever wrote. It is a first-person futuristic narrative set in the state of Britannula, an island somewhere near New Zealand, in the year 1980. The President of Britannula, John Neverbend, decides to institute a fixed term of 67½ years for the life-span of his citizens, after which they will be dealt a painless and compulsory euthanasia. The Fixed Period is similar in style to a book published a few years earlier, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon; in film perhaps its closest kinship is with Logan’s Run or Soylent Green.

Let any man look among his friends,’ Neverbend says, ‘and see whether men of 65 are not in the way of those who are still aspiring to rise in the world. A judge shall be deaf on the bench when younger men below him can hear with accuracy; his voice shall have descended to a poor treble, or his eyesight shall be dim and fading .