The result is summed up by Archibald Henderson as a hodge-podge of utopian, puritanical and authoritarian concepts: In his latter years, Shaw appears to have taken seriously some of the fantastic ideas he had conceived in the writing of imaginative literature; and these fancies hardened with the years into fixed convictions:the ultimate redemption of mankind on earth from the burden of the flesh and the ills that flesh is heir to, the elimination of sexual relations and the universal adoption of artificial insemination, the thoroughgoing reorganization of education with the all-embracing tenet of learning by doing, appreciating literature, art, music, sculpture, architecture, by contact experience (reading, seeing, hearing, painting, drawing, sculpting, building), the elimination by gas asphyxiation of the demonstrably immoral and incurably criminal, the extension of the extreme life span roughly from one century to three centuries, elimination of dependence upon food and learning to live on air and water alone, the rewriting of the Prayer Book of the Church of England, the revision of the Scriptures in order to reconcile the irrational dichotomy of the Deity, seen in two separate images in Old and New Testaments, abolition of the party system, expanding the civil service to embrace the highest offices up to and including the Prime Minister, and many other proposals, particularly the devising of a new alphabet--which are, by an incalculable multitude, irrevocably rejected as fads and follies, quirks and crotchets, fancies and fantasies.

In the first fable, set shortly after World War II, a Jewish chemist decides that the atomic bomb is too clumsy a weapon, and invents a form of poison gas that is lighter than air.

This fable is followed by a dialogue between two men, a woman and a hermaphrodite, who discuss the disgusting way in which humans used to reproduce, explaining that it is now all done in a laboratory, without the need to "practice personal contacts which I would rather not describe".

In the final fable a group of students discuss the existence of purely disembodied beings who live entirely for "knowledge and power" and who use embodied persons to help them achieve it.

[1] Matthew Yde sees the play as essentially a reworking of Back to Methuselah, containing the same ideas about "creative evolution" articulated in the form of a myth that draws on Christian traditions.

The events of World War II, though alluded to, seem to have had no effect on him: "the stunning revelations about Nazi death camps seem to have made no impression on Shaw, nor have altered his belief in the importance of state liquidation of public enemies in the least.

Julius Novick noted the references to the creation of Israel in the figure of the Jewish chemist, who appears to be based on Chaim Weizmann.