2 B R 0 2 B cover art

2 B R 0 2 B

Preview

£0.00 for first 30 days

Try for £0.00
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

2 B R 0 2 B

By: Kurt Vonnegut
Narrated by: Peter Coates
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £0.99

Buy Now for £0.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

2 B R 0 2 B is a science fiction short story by Kurt Vonnegut, originally published in the digest magazine Worlds of If Science Fiction for January 1962, and collected in Vonnegut's Bagombo Snuff Box (1999). The title is pronounced "2 B R naught 2 B" and references the famous phrase "to be, or not to be" from William Shakespeare's Hamlet.

In the story, the title refers to the telephone number that one dials to schedule an assisted suicide with the Federal Bureau of Termination. Vonnegut's 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater describes a story by the name and attributes it to his recurring character Kilgore Trout, but the plot summary given is closer in nature to the eponymous tale from Vonnegut's short-story collection Welcome to the Monkey House.

The setting is a society in which aging has been cured, individuals have indefinite lifespans, and population control is used to limit the population of the United States to forty million, a number which is maintained through a combination of infanticide and government-assisted suicide. In short, for someone to be born, someone else must first volunteer to die. As a result, births are few and far between, and deaths occur primarily by accident.

©2023 Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing (P)2023 Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing
Anthologies & Short Stories Dystopian Fiction Humorous Science Fiction
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Listeners also enjoyed...

Player Piano cover art
The Big Trip up Yonder cover art
Mother Night cover art
Downward to the Earth cover art Pity the Reader cover art
The Morning Star cover art
Confessions of a GP cover art
Robots Through the Ages cover art
2001 cover art
The Science of Self-Learning cover art

What listeners say about 2 B R 0 2 B

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.