Back to Methuselah

In 1921, sixty-five years old and the most famous playwright in the English-speaking world, George Bernard Shaw set out to write the founding myth of a new religion. Back to Methuselah is the result: a cycle of five linked plays, fronted by a preface of essay length, that Shaw subtitled A Metabiological Pentateuch — a five-book scripture for the religion of life itself.

The five plays span almost thirty-six thousand years. The cycle opens in the Garden of Eden in 4004 BC, where Adam and Eve first learn of death and of birth; moves to Shaw's own England, where two brothers announce that humanity could choose to live three hundred years; and then vaults forward through the year 2170 and the year 3000 to the far future of 31,920 AD, a civilization of long-lived "Ancients" born as grown adults and straining toward pure thought. The same human problem is shown at five points across the centuries, forcing the reader to think in evolutionary rather than biographical time.

Beneath the comedy and the science-fiction machinery runs Shaw's great argument: the doctrine of Creative Evolution and the "Life Force" — a will immanent in the universe, striving through living things toward higher consciousness. We behave like savages, Shaw contends, because we die before we grow up; only by willing ourselves to live for centuries will we gain the maturity to govern the powers our science has given us. Rejecting Darwinian natural selection as a counsel of despair, Shaw offers in its place a "religion of the future" — and, in leaping to the year 31,920, writes science fiction of a high and serious kind, alongside Wells and Stapledon.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the play cycle in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor's biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection at the back.