Although the genre of Ringing Out, the short story currently featured on this site, is science fiction, it owes its progeny to the Medieval morality plays popular in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. In these plays, the protagonist is an innocent who succumbs to temptation, has an epiphany or revelation or an encounter, repents, and saves both himself and humanity as a whole.

    In Ringing Out, mankind has conquered aging and eliminated disease. No one grows old and no one gets sick. The possibility of death exists only as the result of accident or what has become unthinkable, murder. And in a society that has taken control of death, a society where no one need die, there is only one punishment for committing murder, and that is the death of the protagonist.

    Of course, in this society, murder is unthinkable because why would anyone commit murder knowing that he would be sacrificing his own life as well? Yet, this is exactly what our protagonist does. He commits a murder and the reason he gives apparently makes no sense. His reason? The man was an ass.

    Morality plays also reflected a dominant belief of the Tudor period, the religious view that humans created their post-death fate during their lives on earth. Similarly, our protagonist seemingly has assumed responsibility for his own post-death fate.

   However, the issue is not as simple as it appears. He is offered a way out but chooses not to take it. The utopia in which they live is an isolated bubble of life in the middle of desert plant, their bubble of immortality surrounded by a shroud of death. Our protagonist is condemned to die but he must choose his own death. Yet, there is no certainty to his death. No certainity to his life, his illusions. The question in the end is what is ringing out. It could be him, or perhaps it is the bells, the wild bells.