2000x/Beyond 2000: The Thing Happens (Based on a story by George Bernard Shaw)

[james_davis_nicoll]

The Thing Happens part 1
The Thing Happens part 2

In an England effectively run by seductive Negresses and cunning Orientals, functionaries near the top of the government struggle to deal with the revelation that a very small fraction of the population lives many times longer than the average person.

You know, I honestly cannot recall the last time I read or heard something that included the sentence "If the white race is to be saved, our destiny is apparent."

Comments

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

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Rather a complicated play, apparently. We should definitely take one sentence by one character as indicating something ominous....

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, anything written in the 1920s or '30s about the future of humanity is bound to have some questionable or horrifying bits in it somewhere: see the first several chapters of Stapledon's Last and First Men. Shaw was probably doing better on the whole. Still, I can see how listening to the third section of this, removed from its context and produced as a radio play circa 2000, would be a disconcerting experience.

(Repeatedly edited because I was unclear on when the recording was actually made.)

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Well, I just looked up Shaw's version (gutenberg.org/ebooks/13084). It's Shaw's usual epater the English, contrasting their immaturity with everyone else, including Scots. The character who wants to 'save' the white race, is one of its rare long-lived mutants, who is proposing marriage to another long-living one, to produce long-living children -- who will live long enough to develop some maturity of their own, thus improving the English race toward the level of all the other races.

I'm not sure I could handle the disconcertingness of what c. 2000 probably made of this.