Saturday, January 06, 2018

The future of pleasure: Under Old Earth

a lot of the questions of genetic engineering (with underpeople/slaves made from animals and body parts grown on condemned prisoners  or pondering the question: If your personality is put into a computer, are you you?) are found in Cordwainer Smith's haunting science fiction, but until now I hadn't found this story on line: from Project Gutenberg Canada: what happens to your soul if you live forever in happiness?

Under Old Earth:


There was the Instrumentality, with its unceasing labor to keep man man. And there were the citizens who walked in the boulevards before the Rediscovery of Man.
The citizens were happy. They had to be happy. If they were found sad, they were calmed and drugged and changed until they were happy again.
This story concerns three of them: the gambler who took the name Sun-boy, who dared to go down to the Gebiet, who confronted himself before he died; the girl Santuna, who was fulfilled in a thousand ways before she died; and the Lord Sto Odin, a most ancient of days, who knew it all and never dreamed of preventing any of it.
Music runs through this story. The soft sweet music of the Earth Government and the Instrumentality, bland as honey and sickening in the end. The wild illegal pulsations of the Gebiet, where most men were forbidden to enter. Worst of all, the crazy fugues and improper melodies of the Bezirk, closed to men for fifty-seven centuries—opened by accident, found, trespassed in! And with it our story begins.

more of his stories HERE.

a few of the stories were made into audiodramas:



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