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Is This Our Future?

Dear Reader,

I can't recall what it was, but something pinged my head about a month ago to make me think about some short stories I'd read a long time ago about a future where everyone's dumb. I couldn't remember the author, but our friends at Google quickly put me on to him: Cyril M. Kornbluth, a frequent collaborator with Frederik Pohl and a prolific writer of SF short stories in the 40's and 50's until his untimely death at age 34.

I found a hardcover book that contains all 56 of his short stories called His Share of Glory. The title comes from the last line of one of his stories (I find that a lot of his stories compress the "point" into the final sentence, almost like the punch line of a joke).

The stories I remembered turned out to be "The Marching Morons," which is about a future in which the population has gradually gotten stupid with a minority of smart people who toil in secret to keep everything working, and "The Little Black Bag," which is set in that same future where a smart guy builds a time machine on a dare and sends an automated doctor's bag (designed for the dummies) back to our time where it is found by a drunk who uses it to become a wealthy doctor.

Kornbluth's concept in both of these was that this sort of future was the end result of smart people not taking time to have babies. If all that sounds familiar, you may be thinking of the cult classic movie Idiocracy, which I recently introduced to one of my daughters.

The premise is that a military experiment in suspended animation results in a man waking up 500 years later to find a world composed completely of morons. Hilarity ensues.

Another of Kornbluth's favorite topics was the excesses of marketing. In The Space Merchants, a novel he co-wrote with Pohl, the future Earth is run by corporations manipulating the public through advertising. I read that when I was a kid. One scene I remember is when the protagonist visits Venus, which has outlawed marketing, and we see the contrast in a shop devoid of advertising except a small handwritten sign indicating they have sandwiches for sale, but they're not very good and you really should have packed your own from home which would have been better but in case you didn't you can buy these. Hmmm. I may have to go looking for that book, too.

What's Rick Reading Now?

In parallel with C.M. Kornbluth, I'm also reading a non-SF novel of some local significance, Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson (no, not the actress in Mad About You). I've hiked a waterfalls near me named for Ms. Jackson, who was a writer in the 1800s, and read about this book in a local museum. It was very popular at the time, and helped raise awareness about Native American issues.

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Happy Reading!

Rick A. Allen

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