#lies inc

I like old sf

It had been suggested, ironically, in imitation of Swift by a fiction writer of the 1950s, that the "Negro Question" in the US be solved by the building of giant factories which made Negroes into canned dog food. Satire, of course, like Swift's A Modest Proposal, that the problem of starvation among the Irish be solved by the eating of the children … Swift himself lamenting, as a final irony, that he had no children of his own to offer to the market for consumption. Grisly, But― This all pointed to the seriousness―not merely of the problem of overpopulation and insufficient food production―but to the insane, schizoid solutions seriously being considered. The brief World War Three ... had taken care of a few millions of people, but―not quite enough. As a solution it had worked to a partial extent; and was, in many influential quarters, viewed exactly as that; as a partial solution. Not as a catastrophe but as a half-answer.

That's the trouble with living in a police state, he said to himself; you think -- you imagine -- the police are behind everything.  You get paranoid and think they're beaming information to you in your sleep, to subliminally control you.  Actually the police wouldn't do that.  The police are our friends.   Or was that idea beamed to me subliminally? he wondered suddenly.  "The police are our friends." the hell they are! He continued shaving, feeling glum about the whole thing.  Maybe the dream will stop coming, he said to himself. Or -- Pausing, he thought, Maybe the dream is trying to tell me something. For a long time he stood without moving, the razor blade held away from his face.  Tell me what?  That I'm living in a garbage dump where there's dried scraps of food, rotting food, and other rats? He trembled. And, as best he could, continued shaving.

Rachmael followed Genet, with her light-emanating useful Swiss-made nipple-assist...