This satire is not great art - it’s not necessarily even great commercial fiction. Its significance lies in calling attention to the 800-pound gorilla lurking behind every aspect of the life sciences: the question of how much innovation we can afford.

Christopher Buckley shares a literary category with Kurt Vonnegut, sometimes labelled “easy writer.” Broad satire, ridiculous names, but nonetheless, a deft hand at pushing today’s reality just slightly into the absurd, and thus allowing us to see that reality more clearly.

The young heroine of Boomsday (a title derived from the economic catastrophe of the Baby Boomers’ retirement) is a two-fer. Named Cassandra, after the doomsayer of ancient Troy, she becomes enraged at the price her generation must pay to support the extended life spans of their elders. During a night of amphetamine stoked blogging, Cassie calls on generation W (for ‘whatever’) to rise up against what she calls The Wrinklies, a.k.a. the resource hogs. She wakes to find that that young people have attacked gated retirement communities all across Florida. Her modest proposal was for a tax revolt, but her rant soon morphs into the concept of tax breaks to entice citizens to kill themselves upon reaching age 65. The concept is picked up by an opportunistic presidential candidate. The sitting president co-opts via the ‘bold step’ of establishing a Blue Ribbon Panel. He throws a further spanner in the works by appointing Gideon Payne to this august commission, a preacher who, aside from leading a group called the Society for the Protection of Every Ribonucleic Molecule (SPERM) also runs a chain of nursing homes. (In this swirl of fund raising and interest groups, SPERM of course gives rise to the joke ‘SPERM donors.’) The candidate, a Senator, wheels and deals with ABBA, the Association of Boomer Advocates, and compromise pushes the age for the tax breaks-suicide quid pro quo to 70 ? then 75, with ‘substantial penalties for non-early withdrawal.’ Which means that the program will now add to the younger generations’ tax burden. Meanwhile, the media discovers that Payne’s nursing homes rely on the actuarially astute ‘RIP software’ invented by Cassandra’s father, which allows the facilities to enroll only those retirees destined for short lives, after extracting agreements for perpetual care in return for assignment of their entire net worth. And so on and so forth.

For those working to retard aging, cure chronic disease, and extend the human life span, the message in this all might be: be careful what you wish for. Or, framed in a more useful way: make sure your social policy measures up to the creativity of your technical innovations