Time Traveler Show #16: 2BR02B (Kurt Vonnegut)

[james_davis_nicoll]

2BR02B (Kurt Vonnegut)

As read by William Coelius, this is a story about a man in a world with strict population limits looking for an innovative way to find room for his three newborns.

Of course, this all falls apart if birth control is available and reliable because then you can schedule births once deaths have freed up slots; even if it's not 100% reliable - and it won't be - it should make it possible to avoid situations like this guy is in. Often I'd give stories like this a pass for predating the Pill but this is from Worlds of If, January 1962 and the Pill was approved for use in 1960.

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

This is the world of the future-uture-uture, where advanced medicine is explicitly part of the setting. How could they be a surprise?

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

They're not a delivery room surprise, right? So it's just that they were trying for one baby and got eggs splitting or multiple ovulation or both. A more realistic option would actually have been selective reduction, but that wouldn't be as dramatic a situation (and wasn't around in 1962).

Heinlein's got a book in which people are allowed to have only two babies per family, and one couple who'd had twins the first time is angling to be allowed a second pregnancy (I think they would have been allowed three kids if they'd had twins second, something like that).