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

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Three newborns suggests suprise triplets.

[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).

[agoodwinsmith.livejournal.com]

Pshaw. Nice girls in the 1980's didn't openly use the pill for such a purpose. They were always prescribed because of "irregular periods". So, 1962, I doubt that many women had even heard of the pill, and those that had would certainly have met resistance from the doctors they asked to prescribe form them, and no doubt would have had to have father's or husband's permission. Don't forget that Dorothy Livesay had to give up her job at Mcleans when her husband got a job as a lumberjack.

[laetitia-apis.livejournal.com]

When I got married in 1964, a prescription for The Pill was a routine part of a pre-nuptial exam. Neither my father nor my intended was even informed.

[agoodwinsmith.livejournal.com]

I'm glad that was your experience.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Once again, science fiction hobbled because of the gender politics - and related assumptions - of the day in which said SF was produced.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Isn't it the projection of our science into the future, that limits the possible stories?

Or, that story might have been written long before it was sold, and bought some time before it was published. Why scrap a good story, then?