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.
Philip K. Dick, Lies, Inc.
