Deathhunter

Deathhunter opens with a rapidly and often wittily sketched utopia, containing the expected hints of something rotten. The Good Life has resulted from the philosophy of the good death: the creed is that after death there's nothing, that you vanish like a turned-off TV picture, that the proper end of life is calm acceptance of oblivion ("you should go gently into that good night"). Psychiatrists have become "death guides" leading the aged and sick into this approved frame of mind—without fear, without hope—before voluntary euthanasia. It is trumpeted that with fear of death abolished, war and other evils have vanished too; at the same time it's quietly made plain that little things like poetry and the creative arts in general have likewise bitten the dust. Even scientific research into the possibility of an afterlife is taboo, since the findings might shake the wobbly dogmas of the Houses of Death....