New York Review of Books

While we were Up Over, Lloyd Rose provided me with several kilos of The New York Review of Books, a highly nutritious weekly magazine. In combing through the last couple of years' worth of reviews and essays, I nourished my weak understanding of several topics, including US politics, thanks to articles like The Rebel Germ (about shock jock Rush Limbaugh) and The Beck of Revelation (about shock jock Glenn Beck). The NYR is a leftie paper, but these analyses are much more than righteous tutting - they give you the background and context of these important players and more of a sense of the men themselves. (Natch there's a ton of stuff about the election in more recent editions.)

Writing news

As some of you will know, Jon & crew are hard at work on The I Job, a radio SF drama which will be broadcast and podcast in 2013.

Meanwhile, my short story from COSMOS magazine, Head Case, is now available online for your perusal. :)

Fun with eugenics

So I'm re-reading Asimov's The Caves of Steel, and as one of the Spacers is explaining the offworld way of life to our hero - no disease, great longevity, sparse population, plenty of robots for the dirty work - he drops this little bombshell:

"Logically, developing children are carefully screened for physical and mental defects before being allowed to mature."

Baley interrupted. "You mean you kill them if they don't -"

"If they don't measure up. Quite painlessly, I assure you. The notion shocks you, just as the Earthman's uncontrolled breeding shocks us."

"We're controlled, Dr. Fastolfe. Each family is allowed so many children."

Dr. Fastolfe smiled tolerantly. "So many of any kind of children; not so many healthy children. And even so, there are many illegitimates and your population increases."

"Who's to judge which children should live?"

"That's rather complicated and not to be answered in a sentence. Some day we may talk it out in detail."

I can't remember off the top of my head whether Asimov does explore this further in later novels. But holy flaming cow, the implications! What exactly does "allowed to mature" mean? Where's the cut-off point for the detection of "defects" - infancy? Puberty? Majority? Do acquired "defects" count, such as a lost limb? Do they do surgical repairs and/or gene therapy in utero? The first signs of my chronic illnesses began to appear when I was about eighteen. How many of us would have made it to Spacer adulthood?

But the really extraordinary thing is this: how did they install this system in the first place?! How do you convince people who have essentially unlimited space and resources (and again, shedloads of robots) to kill their own children? The only thing I can think of is that originally existence on the colony worlds was incredibly harsh, and they became so used to losing children that they began softly killing kids they knew wouldn't survive; if you iterated this for thousands of years, could you end up with a system in which "individual life is of prime importance", which could easily provide all the care the most disabled child could possibly need, and yet weeds out the imperfect? There are uneasy parallels here with our own world, which has enough resources for all, but lets children starve.