Back around 1954, Kurt Vonnegut was already getting his stories into magazines, still a decade away from the big mainstream fame that Slaughterhouse-Five would bring him. Vonnegut always seemed to enjoy using his fiction to take the mickey out of things like war, politics, culture – usually through that analytical, melancholy lens of his, as if he’d just made his peace with the way things are. And naturally, he always used humour to serve up those conditions.

Here’s the thing: in the post-war years, the US–and other countries too–were dealing with a demographic headache. The baby boom was in full swing, suburb overcrowding was a massive talking point, and gerontology was becoming a proper scientific field. Not to mention all those doomsday theories about running out of resources–you know the drill. But yeah, the idea of a fast-ageing population competing with a rapidly growing young one for limited space and resources wasn’t some far-off abstraction. These days you see countries working to handle the opposite problem: lots of old people, not enough young ones. Which, of course, brings its own heap of conspiracy theories.

Even so, this is about humanity finally cracking the code on slowing down ageing through science. Trouble is, hardly anyone stops to think about the fallout if that sort of breakthrough actually happened. Most stories that tackle this problem get bogged down in moral questions, but Vonnegut goes for the small, everyday problems this tech would cause. Not that morality’s absent–it’s just that Vonnegut prefers to focus on the little hiccups progress never sees coming.