Vintage kort berättelse i framtiden där det intelligenta / okunniga förhållandet har blivit 10/90, tillsammans med överbefolkning, och hur 10% hanterar det

"Marching Morons" (1951) av Cyril M. Kornbluth har en Wikipedia-sida och finns på Project Gutenberg ; Den är inställd i samma univers som Kornbluths tidigare berättelse "The Little Black Bag" .

Situationen förklaras av John Barlow, en man från det förflutna, som har blivit återupplivad från upphängd animering:

"We need the rockets and trick speedometers and cities because, while you and your kind were being prudent and foresighted and not having children, the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers were shiftlessly and shortsightedly having children—breeding, breeding. My God, how they bred!"

"Wait a minute!" objected Barlow. "There were lots of people in our crowd who had two or three children."

"The attrition of accidents, illness, wars and such took care of that. Your intelligence was bred out. It is gone. Children that should have been born never were. The just-average, they'll-get-along majority took over the population. The average IQ now is 45."

"But that's far in the future—"

"So are you," grunted the hawk-faced man sourly.

"But who are you people?"

"Just people—real people. Some generations ago, the geneticists realized at last that nobody was going to pay any attention to what they said, so they abandoned words for deeds. Specifically, they formed and recruited for a closed corporation intended to maintain and improve the breed. We are their descendants, about three million of us. There are five billion of the others, so we are their slaves.

"During the past couple of years I've designed a skyscraper, kept Billings Memorial Hospital here in Chicago running, headed off war with Mexico and directed traffic at La Guardia Field in New York."

Moronerna är enkelt underhållna:

"The show of shows! The supershow! The super-duper show! The quiz of quizzes! Take It and Stick It!"

There were shrieks of laughter in the background.

"Here we got the contes-tants all ready to go. You know how we work it. I hand a contes-tant a triangle-shaped cutout and like that down the line. Now we got these here boards, and they got cutout places the same shape as the triangles and things, only they're all different shapes, and the first contes-tant that sticks the cutouts into the boards, he wins."

"Now I'm gonna innaview the first contes-tant. Right here, honey. What's your name?"

"Name? Uh—"

"Hoddaya like that, folks? She don't remember her name! Hah? Would you buy that for a quarter?" The question was spoken with arch significance, and the audience shrieked, howled and whistled in appreciation.

De luras lätt:

The automobiles have a top speed of one hundred kilometers per hour—a kilometer is, if I remember my paleolinguistics, three-fifths of a mile—and the speedometers are all rigged accordingly so the drivers will think they're going two hundred and fifty.

Historien är satirisk men inte särskilt humoristisk och har ingen "väldigt rolig avslutning". Faktum är att det slutar med en Hitler-stil förintelse. Befolkningsproblemet löses genom att lägga alla moroner på raketer "till Venus":

Los Angeles loved the idea and a forest of spaceships began to blossom in the desert. They weren't very good spaceships but they didn't have to be.

A team at the Pole worked at Barlow's direction on a mail setup. There would have to be letters to and from Venus to keep the slightest taint of suspicion from arising. Luckily Barlow remembered that the problem had been solved once before—by Hitler. Relatives of persons incinerated in the furnaces of Lublin or Majdanek continued to get cheery postal cards.

The Los Angeles flight went off on schedule, under tremendous press, newsreel and television coverage. The world cheered the gallant Angelenos who were setting off on their patriotic voyage to the land of milk and honey. The forest of spaceships thundered up, and up, and out of sight without untoward incident. Billions envied the Angelenos, cramped and on short rations though they were.

Du tänker antingen på Space Merchants eller conflating Space Merchants med Marching Morons . ( Space Merchants var samskriven av Kornbluth, med Pohl.)

• 10% eliten försöker lista ut vad man ska göra med resten - kolla! (Där eliten är företagsledare och den mest professionella av alla professionella klasser: reklammanarna!)

• Massor av beskrivningar av underhållande underhållningar för chefer och proles - kolla! Till exempel, "Golf", en sport som är reserverad för chefer är - extremt minigolf spelad på små maskiner (som Ski-Ball). Etc. etc.

• Rymdresor till andra planeter är i de tidiga dagarna - kolla!

• Lösningen är att skicka ut människor för att kolonisera Venus - kolla!

• Rolig slut - kolla! (Eller ironiskt, eller plot-twisted, eller något. Typiskt Kornbluth / Pohl.)

Space Merchants är en ROFL satir, esp. med tanke på 1950-talets synvinkel om var författarens tänkande samhälle leddes. (I motsats Marching Morons skulle förmodligen karakteriseras som "mörk humor" / "svart komedi".)

Det var många omslag under åren , här är en jag minns:

Enuppföljare,Merchant'sWar,ärvärtattläsaockså,menintesåbra.Jaggillarsärskilt,iTheMerchant'sWar,denextremtberoendeframkallandecoladrinken...glömmersittnamn..."moky oke"? "moke cola"? Vad som än, när du har haft en nypa, måste du ha mer!