in earning a living to keep her husband away at the farm or factory almost every waking hour. With the increase in leisure time, in productivity of labor, especially in such external aids to child-rearing as schools and nurseries, the functional need for the family is somewhat different. Our social structure has not yet really caught up with that fact, although the signs are writ large; I am only assuming that in five hundred years it will have done so.
A similar defense could be made for almost every speculation in this novel, including the presence of Sirians. (Or, anyway, extraterrestrial creatures capable of doing the sort of thing that Sirians do in the story. There are more than one hundred billion stars in our own galaxy, and it is a dead-certain bet that at least some of them have inhabited planets.) But I should confess that there are two areas in which I am defenseless.
One of these includes the things I have left out. I have not taken into consideration the probabilities of large- scale disaster—through nuclear warfare, or lethal pollution of the air, or a runaway population explosion sufficient to starve us all back to the Neolithic. But there’s just so much you can discuss in one story, and I wasn’t happening to discuss those possibilities here.
And the other thing I can’t defend is the time scale.
If you put together Project MAC and Bob Ettinger’s freezers and the negative income tax, you have something that is really quite a lot like The Age of the Pussyfoot . . .constructed out of materials that are to hand right now. In the novel, the time scale is large: five centuries. Charles Forrester’s revival is as far in one direction along our time scale as Christopher Columbus’s voyage is in the other.
I don’t really think it will be that long. Not five centuries.
Perhaps not even five decades.
Frederik Pohl
Red Bank, New Jersey
July 1968
“The Age of the Pussyfoot” appeared in a shorter version in Galaxy Magazine.
