In a future where death is not random but scheduled and state-regulated, humanity believes it has conquered its oldest enemy-only to discover the true horror begins when dying becomes a privilege.
Permission to Die is a chilling and deeply contemplative dystopian speculative fiction collection exploring a society where every citizen learns the exact date of their death long before it arrives. At adulthood, each person must choose between two legal lifespans: sixty years in an unaging body that cannot die until the appointed night, or one hundred and twenty years of slow decline in a body that ages normally but cannot die early from accident, illness, or catastrophe. No matter the selection, death comes peacefully, predictably, and right on schedule.
But certainty does not mean safety. And longevity does not guarantee meaning.
Through haunting, slow-burn storytelling that blurs the line between existential horror and literary science fiction, Permission to Die examines what happens when mortality is bureaucratized and survival is mandated. Bodies that cannot die become state resources. Love becomes a negotiation between mismatched time horizons. Grief becomes a countdown. And usefulness becomes currency, especially for those whose bodies endure what others cannot.
From an unaging emergency responder exploited for her indestructibility, to a one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old man who tattoos each remaining day onto his own failing body, to families fractured by the burden of outliving one another, these stories reveal the quiet violence of certainty. When there is no chance of early death, the true fear becomes being forced to continue.
For readers who crave dystopian fiction, speculative futures, post-human ethical dilemmas, and emotionally intelligent psychological horror, this collection resonates with the melancholic brilliance of Never Let Me Go, the eerie precision of Exhalation, and the unsettling realism of Station Eleven-yet charts its own path into the darkest corners of longevity, control, and survival.
Themes include: scheduled mortality, deterministic death, longevity ethics, immortality contracts, mandated survival, existential dread, bureaucratic dystopia, aging, guilt, love, exploitation, and the horrifying cost of removing uncertainty from life.
Permission to Die asks a simple question with devastating consequences:
If you cannot die early, what will the world do with you until it allows you to leave?
For fans of dystopian speculative fiction, existential sci-fi, psychological futurism, bioethical horror, and literary sci-fi short story collections, this book is an unforgettable journey into humanity's future-and its undoing.
