Mixed Bag of Sci-Fi
Vonnegut's other favorite bag is science fiction, a genre usually marked by a weakness of real characters and the pronouncement of human messages. Here, the message is crisply transmitted and often with humor in stories about a world without war, achieved by a single scientist's powers of concentration; life without fear, won by freeing the spirit from the body; and the realization of instant, synthetic happiness by tuning in on the radio waves of distant stars with a "euphoriaphone." In one of the liveliest sci-fi stories, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow," the discovery of an anti-aging potion has pushed the world of 2158 to a population of 12 billion, which largely exists on a diet of processed seaweed and sawdust. In the three-room apartment of a housing development that covers what once was southern Connecticut live the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Harold Schwartz, 172. Gramps, a crochety tyrant who is glued to television, barks, "Hell, we did that 100 years ago," and regularly disinherits family grumblers who are restlessly waiting--vainly, it seems--for him to die and vacate the only private bedroom in the place. The title story takes up the same theme, overpopulation, but treats it sententiously. World Government is waging a two-front war on the problem by encouraging "ethical" suicide and by making sex joyless; the latter is accomplished with mandatory pills that numb the body from the waist down. Our hero is Billy the Poet, whose special pleasure is deflowering the Junoesque virgins administering the program and who heads a coeducational underground whose members favor birth control, of course, and aim to revive the hearty sex of their ancestors. Among these forefathers, presumably, is Hugh Hefner of Playboy, author of a relentlessly documented "philosophy" that rests on pillars of thought similar to Billy's. With this in mind, how uncharacteristically unkind of Vonnegut to have written on another, earlier, occasion: ". . .the science fiction magazine that pays the most and seems to have the poorest judgment is Playboy.".