Suicide Booth - Early Mentions

Early Mentions

William Archer suggested that in the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot machines by which a man could kill himself for a penny.

In Robert Sheckley's Immortality, Inc. (1959), the protagonist wakes up in an unfamiliar future and, while wandering dazed in a starkly changed New York, finds himself in what he thinks might be a bread line, but turns out to be a line for the suicide booths. In the movie Freejack (loosely based on Immortality, Inc.), suicide booths are not shown, but advertisements for suicide-assistance services are visible against the city skyline.

In Ivan Efremov's 1968 novel The Bull's Hour, suicide booths are referred to as the "palaces of tender death" (Russian: Дворцы нежной смерти). They're commonly used on the planet Tormance to control the birth rate.

Kurt Vonnegut's "purple-roofed Ethical Suicidal Parlors" appear in two stories: "Welcome to the Monkey House" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater". In these Ethical Suicide Parlors, a patron receives a free meal in the adjoining Howard Johnson's diner before committing suicide. It is considered a citizen's patriotic duty to commit suicide.

While not a booth, suicide chambers are used to allow people to choose a pleasant form of euthanasia in the movie Soylent Green. The character Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson) leaves a note saying that he is "going home," a euphemism for committing state-approved suicide via a large, well-appointed, attended suicide chamber. Music and a video chosen by the client are played while he or she waits for the drugs to take their fatal effect. Roth chooses Ludwig van Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and a video of Earth's natural wonders and scenes of pastoral beauty.