When people talk about how entwined the tech arena and science fiction fandom are, pro-natalism is a classic example, and it’s been a factor for a long, ling time. That assumption that science fiction fans are better than everyone else and therefore should have children while everyone else is sterilized goes all the way from the genre’s earliest days, such as the “fans are slans” mantra through the 1950s and 1960s refeering to the A.E. van Vogt novel “Slan.” The only difference now is that the Cat Piss Men who in previous years could only dream in their parents’ basements about surrounding themselves with supermodels spitting out superior children to offset poor breeding (Robert Heinlein famously mocked that in his novel “Tunnel In the Sky,” and Norman Spinrad particularly went after pro-natalism’s connections to Nazism in “The Iron Dream”) now have the power to make it happen. Trust me: the only reason why we won’t be getting legislative pushes for procreation licenses that require IQ testing as a parameter any time soon would be the embarrassment of the bills’ sponsors and boosters when they discover they wouldn’t qualify under their own standards.
When people talk about how entwined the tech arena and science fiction fandom are, pro-natalism is a classic example, and it’s been a factor for a long, ling time. That assumption that science fiction fans are better than everyone else and therefore should have children while everyone else is sterilized goes all the way from the genre’s earliest days, such as the “fans are slans” mantra through the 1950s and 1960s refeering to the A.E. van Vogt novel “Slan.” The only difference now is that the Cat Piss Men who in previous years could only dream in their parents’ basements about surrounding themselves with supermodels spitting out superior children to offset poor breeding (Robert Heinlein famously mocked that in his novel “Tunnel In the Sky,” and Norman Spinrad particularly went after pro-natalism’s connections to Nazism in “The Iron Dream”) now have the power to make it happen. Trust me: the only reason why we won’t be getting legislative pushes for procreation licenses that require IQ testing as a parameter any time soon would be the embarrassment of the bills’ sponsors and boosters when they discover they wouldn’t qualify under their own standards.
This is really smart.