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A close look at Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons"
I've reread "The Marching Morons" by C. M. Kornbluth (1951), a story whose title I think is still remembered..
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51233
It's pretty short. People might want to read it to be sure they're having their own reactions.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=marching+morons&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
It's naturally swamped by Idiocracy, a word which had a longer history than I expected, but I assume recent references are to the movie.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=marching+morons%2Cidiocracy&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
Anyway, here's a little essay about it, which I wrote in a response to the idea that Barlow was supposed to be a science fiction fan. I think he was a movie fan rather than a fan of more sophisticated print sf. The story was written when there was much less in the way of thoughtful sf movies.
So, what is this story actually about? One way of looking at SFF is that it's rationalized dream images.
I think that to a large extent, it's what it appears to be-- it's about frustration at being surrounded by stupid people and obliged to take care of them without annoying them. We will cheerfully ignore that almost all the people reading it wouldn't qualify as one of the geniuses.
Killing the morons is presented as bad, but I don't think we're given any reason to like them.
The reader is also invited to feel superior to Barlow. I'm not sure how the reader is supposed to feel about the geniuses. I think basically sympathetic to their desire to spend their time on what interests them.
I think Barlow likes movie sf, if that matters. Or I may be wrong about that-- one commenter on facebook pointed out that in 1951, there were sf movies. Maybe there's some print sf Kornbluth was satirizing that I don't remember.
Barlow is fairly knowledgeable about the holocaust, and I think that's his primary inspiration, not science fiction. The most I take away is that science fiction (including wanting to lead a revolt against dictatorship) doesn't insulate a person against being genocidal.
And here is me live-blogging the story.
This may be one of the very few sf stories that mention firing pottery. The only other one I can think of is "The Potters of Firsk" by Vance.
Barlow at least cares about his wife, "poor Verna". He isn't a pure sociopath.
I used to have one of those phone numbers that had two letters and five numbers.
I'm interested in those overburdened geniuses. Does it actually make sense that there are so few of them and yet two of them are shepherding a small business contract?
Barlow describes himself as "not much of a reader", so not exactly a fan.
The news consisting of petty insults between politicians is all too familiar. One for Kornbluth.
Barlow is trying to be a hero. He's just very clueless.
"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 short-sightedly having children" Sounds like a conservative talking point.
"Migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers" might not be as intelligent on the average as better off people, but they're also functional, not nearly as stupid as the majority in the story.
It's interesting that the world population tops out at five billion. And the geniuses aren't breeding that fast, possibly because of time needed to educate them. If you want to run numbers, there are three million geniuses. I suspect the numbers don't make sense.
"That depends. I sold ten thousand acres of Siberian tundra—through a dummy firm, of course—after the partition of Russia. The buyers thought they were getting improved building lots on the outskirts of Kiev. I'd say that was a lot tougher than this job." Barlow is definitely a scammer.
The story was written in 1951 before chemical birth control (approved by the FDA in 1960), but if Kornbluth had imagined it, he wouldn't have had this story.
It's interesting that Barlow is sexually shy. He's embarrassed by the blatant advertising of the future and doesn't demand *beautiful* secretaries. I suppose that would make it a different story.
The passage about Mrs. Garvey wondering how living on Venus got into the news is an interesting depiction of gaslighting and sexism.
Note that the billions of corpses from neglecting the moronic majority is an insoluble problem until somehow Barlow says, why not just kill them? That plan is accepted.
"The last thing he learned was that death is the end of pain." When I first read the story, I amended this to "death is not the end of pain".
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51233
It's pretty short. People might want to read it to be sure they're having their own reactions.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=marching+morons&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
It's naturally swamped by Idiocracy, a word which had a longer history than I expected, but I assume recent references are to the movie.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=marching+morons%2Cidiocracy&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
Anyway, here's a little essay about it, which I wrote in a response to the idea that Barlow was supposed to be a science fiction fan. I think he was a movie fan rather than a fan of more sophisticated print sf. The story was written when there was much less in the way of thoughtful sf movies.
So, what is this story actually about? One way of looking at SFF is that it's rationalized dream images.
I think that to a large extent, it's what it appears to be-- it's about frustration at being surrounded by stupid people and obliged to take care of them without annoying them. We will cheerfully ignore that almost all the people reading it wouldn't qualify as one of the geniuses.
Killing the morons is presented as bad, but I don't think we're given any reason to like them.
The reader is also invited to feel superior to Barlow. I'm not sure how the reader is supposed to feel about the geniuses. I think basically sympathetic to their desire to spend their time on what interests them.
I think Barlow likes movie sf, if that matters. Or I may be wrong about that-- one commenter on facebook pointed out that in 1951, there were sf movies. Maybe there's some print sf Kornbluth was satirizing that I don't remember.
Barlow is fairly knowledgeable about the holocaust, and I think that's his primary inspiration, not science fiction. The most I take away is that science fiction (including wanting to lead a revolt against dictatorship) doesn't insulate a person against being genocidal.
And here is me live-blogging the story.
This may be one of the very few sf stories that mention firing pottery. The only other one I can think of is "The Potters of Firsk" by Vance.
Barlow at least cares about his wife, "poor Verna". He isn't a pure sociopath.
I used to have one of those phone numbers that had two letters and five numbers.
I'm interested in those overburdened geniuses. Does it actually make sense that there are so few of them and yet two of them are shepherding a small business contract?
Barlow describes himself as "not much of a reader", so not exactly a fan.
The news consisting of petty insults between politicians is all too familiar. One for Kornbluth.
Barlow is trying to be a hero. He's just very clueless.
"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 short-sightedly having children" Sounds like a conservative talking point.
"Migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers" might not be as intelligent on the average as better off people, but they're also functional, not nearly as stupid as the majority in the story.
It's interesting that the world population tops out at five billion. And the geniuses aren't breeding that fast, possibly because of time needed to educate them. If you want to run numbers, there are three million geniuses. I suspect the numbers don't make sense.
"That depends. I sold ten thousand acres of Siberian tundra—through a dummy firm, of course—after the partition of Russia. The buyers thought they were getting improved building lots on the outskirts of Kiev. I'd say that was a lot tougher than this job." Barlow is definitely a scammer.
The story was written in 1951 before chemical birth control (approved by the FDA in 1960), but if Kornbluth had imagined it, he wouldn't have had this story.
It's interesting that Barlow is sexually shy. He's embarrassed by the blatant advertising of the future and doesn't demand *beautiful* secretaries. I suppose that would make it a different story.
The passage about Mrs. Garvey wondering how living on Venus got into the news is an interesting depiction of gaslighting and sexism.
Note that the billions of corpses from neglecting the moronic majority is an insoluble problem until somehow Barlow says, why not just kill them? That plan is accepted.
"The last thing he learned was that death is the end of pain." When I first read the story, I amended this to "death is not the end of pain".