Sarah Holland-Batt

And really, we avoid thinking about it.

We avoid thinking about end of life.

And that got me sort of onto some literary kind of iterations of this idea and then the way in which this idea plays out, of course, in policy as well.

But it is a really persistent kind of magical thinking, this idea that, oh, that's terrible, but that happens to that group of people over there and that won't ever happen to me.

Well, it's really interesting because, of course, at the moment we're obsessed with dystopias.

I mean, that's all anyone's reading.

Those are the films that we're watching.

They're the TV shows that we're watching.

So we consume a lot of dystopian fiction at present.

But, you know, in fact, the elderly are often absent in these kinds of narratives.

They're just not present.

They've been killed off.

They're not part of the kind of protagonists of the narratives.

And we just don't see them.

And so I became interested in, well, where are the elderly in this kind of imagining of what the future might be like?

And when you actually track back, and this sort of history stretches all the way back to Plato, there's this kind of persistent trope of genocide.

And genocide is the killing of the elderly when they're sort of perceived to have reached an age where they're no longer useful, they're no longer economically productive to society.

And this kind of trope

endures over time, over and over again.

Writers are looking at the status of the elderly, seeing the way in which they're ignored, undervalued by society, and casting a kind of mirror upon this, a dystopian mirror.