Culture of Death :: SteynOnline

Programming note: Steyn’s Song of the Week can now be heard weekly on Serenade Radio, every Sunday at 5.30pm Greenwich Mean Time. If you missed today’s show, you can hear the repeat at 5.30am Monday UK time – that’s 9.30pm Pacific Sunday evening on the West Coast of North America, or Monday afternoon in Australia.

Meanwhile, welcome along to the fifty-ninth in our series Tales for Our Time – and our first venture into the work of Anthony Trollope, although we’re a long way from Barsetshire. As I explain in my introduction, The Fixed Period isn’t Trollope the contemporary social observer but Trollope the speculative dystopian futurologist. Set on a Pacific island somewhere near New Zealand in 1980, this is a tale of a well-ordered society reaching a particular conclusion about what to do with its more elderly and useless citizens.

The book was a flop when first published in 1882, and it remains an oddity in Trollope’s oeuvre. But these last two very strange years have brought it bobbing up to the surface in my mind time and again. Kate Smyth mentions it every so often in our comments, too. In the age of Covid and climate fanaticism, we have big under-reported news stories about the vulnerable elderly slaughtered en masse in so-called “care homes”, and small over-reported news stories about the appalling over-sixties having the biggest carbon footprints. You don’t have to be that paranoid to think that when Davos Man enthuses over “The Great Reset” he’s thinking about a world with a greatly reduced population.

And so we come to Britannula, a former Crown Colony whose political class, as its president explains in our first episode, has been thinking outside the box and come up with its own “Great Reset” – “the Fixed Period”:

It consists altogether of the abolition of the miseries, weakness, and fainéant imbecility of old age, by the prearranged ceasing to live of those who would otherwise become old. Need I explain to the inhabitants of England, for whom I chiefly write, how extreme are those sufferings, and how great the costliness of that old age which is unable in any degree to supply its own wants? Such old age should not, we Britannulists maintain, be allowed to be. This should be prevented, in the interests both of the young and of those who do become old when obliged to linger on after their “period” of work is over.

To hear me read the first part of The Fixed Period, Mark Steyn Club members should please click here and log-in.

~We’re still getting mail about March’s Tale – A Journey through the Bucovina with Sacheverell Sitwell. Steven Sicotte, a Louisiana Steyn Clubber, writes:

The images were so well expressed I could smell the dust and feel the grit in my teeth. The Jewish problem was palpable. How many of those poor souls were shipped to the death camps? And Sholom Secunda’s voice was so powerful, beautiful and haunting. Thanks for another well done reading Mark!

Thank you, Steven, and to every other correspondent. I don’t think you can really understand Ukraine and its surrounding states from Moldova to Poland without some such guide as Sir Sacheverell.

~We have all kinds of tales in our archives, from the leisurely comedy of Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat to P G Wodehouse with a social conscience in Psmith, Journalist – oh, and some fusty notions of honor and duty in a certain other fellow’s The Prisoner of Windsor. Tales for Our Time in all its variety is both highly relevant and a welcome detox from the madness of the hour: over four years’ worth of my audio adaptations of classic fiction starting with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s cracking tale of an early conflict between jihadists and westerners in The Tragedy of the Korosko. To access them all, please see our easy-to-navigate Netflix-style Tales for Our Time home page. We’ve introduced a similar tile format for my Sunday Poems and also for our Hundred Years Ago Show.

We launched The Mark Steyn Club over four-and-a-half years ago, and I’m overwhelmed by all those members across the globe who’ve signed up to be a part of it – from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Cook County to the Cook Islands, West Virginia to the West Midlands. As I said at the time, membership isn’t for everyone, but it is a way of ensuring that all our content remains available for everyone.

That said, we are offering our Club members a few extras, including our monthly audio adventures by Dickens, Conrad, Kafka, Gogol, Jane Austen, H G Wells, Louisa May Alcott, George Orwell, Baroness Orczy, Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Louis Stevenson – plus a couple of pieces of non-classic fiction by yours truly. You can find them all here. We’re very pleased by the response to our Tales – and we even do them live occasionally, and sometimes with special guests.

I’m truly thrilled that one of the most popular of our Steyn Club extras these last four-plus years has been our nightly radio serials. If you’ve enjoyed them and you’re looking for a present for a fellow fan of classic fiction, I hope you’ll consider our special Club Gift Membership. Aside from Tales for Our Time, The Mark Steyn Club does come with other benefits:

~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
~The chance to engage in live Clubland Q&A sessions with yours truly, such as yesterday’s;
~Transcript and audio versions of The Mark Steyn Show and our other video content;
~My video series of classic poetry;
~Booking for special members-only events, such as The Mark Steyn Christmas Show, assuming such events are ever again lawful;
~Advance booking for my live appearances around the world, assuming “live appearances” become a thing once more;
~Customized email alerts for new content in your areas of interest;
~and the opportunity to support our print, audio and video ventures as they wing their way around the planet.

To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here – and don’t forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you’ll get access not only to The Fixed Period but to all the other yarns gathered together at the Tales for Our Time home page.

One other benefit to membership is our Comment Club privileges. So, if you think The Fixed Period is a bust, feel free to have at it.

And do join us tomorrow evening for Part Two of our Trollope dystopia, and every night circa 1am Greenwich Mean Time thereafter.