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

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

This was apparently the middle section of Back to Methuselah:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_Methuselah

In some ways it seems that the central idea here was a precursor of Niven's protectors or Wilson's "second adulthood", and at the end he introduces the beloved SF idea of eventual progression to bodiless energy beings. There's lots there that is queasy-making in a modern context, of course.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And Heinlein's Howard Families, of course. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Heinlein got it directly from Shaw.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Huh, he apparently directly mentioned Back to Methuselah in one of his stories, though either Heinlein or the character had gotten their quotes mixed up, and is actually referring to the preface to a different play:

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/40682297?uid=3739696&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102111889803

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

+

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.