Review: The Fixed Period by Anthony Trollope

Trade paperback, 183 pages
Published 1991 (originally 1881-82)

Acquired December 2012

Read January 2013

The Fixed Period by Anthony Trollope

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. 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. (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. 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. 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.

It's kind of a dull book, but where Trollope succeeds is in writing a narrator completely sure of his own righteousness. Neverbend just sees the world differently than other people, through the lens of rationality and statistics and the national interest. (The novel takes place on the independent former British colony of Britannula, which I think is in the vicinity of Australia and New Zealand.) Neverbend's plan is overturned, both by the people of Britannula and the British government, but he never sees why. Up until the very end, he is comparing himself to people like Galileo and Socrates, as scientific reformers who people didn't understand in their own age. Neverbend just doesn't get it, and he never will; his way of thinking is incommensurable with everyone else's, and in keeping this stubborn man (mostly) sympathetic throughout is where The Fixed Period's greatest success lies. You understand why Neverbend thinks what he does, even as you understand what he cannot: why everyone else thinks as they do.