Nick DiChario envisions a not-so-rosy future courtesy of Kurt Vonnegut.
"Everything was perfectly swell.
There were no prisons, no slums, no insane
asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars.
All diseases were conquered. So was old age."
So begins '2 B R 0 2 B', a clever short story by
Kurt Vonnegut Jr, the author of far more famous
works such as Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle,
The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, and many
others. The story first appeared in the January
1962 issue of the pulp sci-fi magazine Worlds of If.
Its modest utopian beginnings quickly open up to
an underlying dystopia: the only way to maintain
the perfect balance on this seemingly perfect
far-future Earth is to limit the population to
precisely forty million souls. But old age has
been beaten. To maintain eternal happiness,
should birth control fail, one must acquiesce to
either infanticide or suicide choose your
pleasuree. Those few adults who decide they want
to die are encouraged to call the Federal Bureau
of Termination's hotline at 2 B R 0 2 B
(pronounced 2 B or naught 2 B) and make an
appointment for euthanasia, thus opening the door
for the birth of a new human. No one is forced
into death, unless you count social pressure,
although there is plenty of that in a society
where the most admired man on the planet is Dr
Hitz, "responsible for setting up the very first gas chamber in Chicago."
<http://philosophynow.org/issue70/70dichario.htm>Review
<http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/21279>Free
download of story on Project Gutenberg
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/01/2-b-r-0-2-b-by-kurt-vonnegut.htm>monochrom
at 1/29/2009 05:35:00 PM