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The Project Gutenberg license is longer than the actual story.
Main download page with more formats:
Dangerous Visions, the anthology edited by Harlan Ellison, contains something similar, if a bit more graphic.
What is the name of the story?
I think it's this one.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_to_End_All_Stories...
See also Farnham's Freehold by Heinlein.
Oh, Lord. That was a stinker. And, in general, I'm a big Heinlein fan.
Really cool short story
To Serve Man!
Thank you for submitting this!
YN hug of death?
I wonder if there is a chance for HN to contribute some aid for sites like this, archive.org, and others whenever their links are on the frontpage.
Seconding this idea. IA especially is an astronomical gold mine and its benefits to humanity as a whole are immeasurable, I'm sure it could use non-monetary help beside the usual donation campaigns.
I’d be surprised if a big project like PG went down for serving a small static HTML file. I’ve only ever known them have problems when there’s been something more fundamental, or if you were in Germany between 2019 and 2021.
Terribly unrealistic, of course. No actual interstellar empire would refuse to give aid to slavers. On the contrary, the imperial core would give them more aid in order to quell any slave uprising.
Eh, considering the period this was written, sci fi was associated with both technologically and socially advanced people, with the basic assumption that something like a communist society would allow for technological development unparalleled in history.
Writing off an entire planet seems the most barbaric of the 3.
Does it?
Imagine Taliban with their treatment of women, queer people, freedom advocates, and dissenters. Or Imagine DPRK. Now with an entire planet's worth of control.
Would you willingly give them technology so they can oppress their own people better?
There are options in between that you're excluding.
If DPRK wasn't wagging their nukes around they'd get all the technology they needed. Ditto Iran (compare with Saudi Arabia).
Kinda telling that you don't mention the hazara.
Flip it over, why would you allow the US this kind of power?
Also called sanctions (we do those all the time, and it is usually only the poor suffering the most) or the morally superior prime directive.
Sanctions can be necessary, and usefull, but incredibly hard to do right and target them correctly. Sanctions also suck at changing whomever is target for whatever.
Based on a book by Dan Drezner, sanctions aren't impactful. However, the threat of sanctions is. In order for the threat to be credible you need to follow through with actual sanctions whenever they are threatened and the other party is non-compliant.
Yeah, while reading the story, I was thinking that maybe the planet would be disqualified for having an unionized work force.
It would have been more funny if the reason was not disclosed at the end.
It's not supposed to be funny. The shock twist of it being cannibalism is supposed to make you think about the nature of default cultural assumptions and meta-ethics: "what factors Tardo would consider significant—probably very minor ones that the average man would not notice, he thought", and which the host fails to think of despite attempting to hide the slavery & cannibalism, in the same way that you might serve a visitor from India cow steak. (The author was from Brazil, incidentally, which may be relevant to how you interpret this: https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/fontenay_charles_l )
The lesson is to look for what’s missing and hidden.
True on so many levels, and most of the time ignored.
Spoilers. :-(
If you're worried about spoilers for something, why would you be reading the comments discussing it?
This highly influential story was published in 1954.
Maybe funny isn't the right word for you, I mean the story would be better if it encouraged the reader to think for themselves.
How do we know it wasn't a placenta in delicate wine sauce?
I don't object to our culture, I grew up in it, I don't know any better. Killing animals for food is accepted, cannibalism is not. I have no reason to object to burials, we prefer to be eaten by worms underground.
That said, I have no objective explanation why others must follow this example.
It reminds me of a lunch at work, a Muslim points to their dish and says you are not eating pork are you? The Hindu points at his plate and says: cows are sacred to us. They rolled their eyes and didn't know how to progress the conversation. I jokingly told them: we eat everything! Do you also eat people the Muslim asked. I thought for a bit and said, it depends on the situation. He said, that is true, if there is nothing else we are also allowed to eat pork... and everything else.
Likewise, Christianity is also fine with it provided it is forced by necessity.
I talk with 2 angry vegetarians one time who argued that we don't kill animals for food, there is plenty of food. When asked about nutrition they said no one needs that much meat. You are killing animals purely for pleasure. A surprising revelation, they were right!?! I ended the conversation by asking: What has that broccoli ever done to you?
It remains of course a terrible concept in the more atheistic world view but would it be more horrific than people eating sacred animals?
The story is that they had quite the hard time surviving on their planet. If people die trying to survive and there is no other food. Should one chose to die from starvation? Should I be the one to judge here?
I see room for cultural normalization. If someone dies from an accident and you have to plow the fields by hand with half a carrot to eat, it might be required.
The Solar Council is primarily interested in putting its own arrogance on display. Its Planetary Aid agent doesn't give a flying fuck about the slaves. That much is obvious.
To bad Gwern, looks like we will be pulling the plow again tomorrow. Thanks for nothing Solar Council!
> "My recommendation will be of considerable importance to you," said Tardo as they ate. "If it is favorable, there is certain technical aid aboard ship which will be made available to you at once. Of course, you will not receive advanced equipment from the Solar Council until there is a more thorough investigation."
Dude, advanced equipment? All I wanted was a few oxen and some chickens.
> What has that broccoli ever done to you?
A better argument for vegans is not that their food does not require the killing of other living beings, but that some of the living beings that are killed for food, e.g. plants, fungi or even bivalves, have a life in culture conditions that is indistinguishable from the life of their free-living relatives, until the moment when they are killed.
On the other hand, most of the vertebrates that are now grown in industrial conditions, or even most of the arthropods, spend their life in conditions that are indistinguishable from intentional torture.
When I was a child and I was eating chicken that were grown in true free-range conditions (at my grandparents), I did not see any problem with that. Those chicken had a happy life, spending all their days roaming and searching for food through a great land area covered with varied vegetation and inhabited by many insects and worms. The only difference from wild chicken was that they could supplement the food that they were gathering themselves with maize grains and that they had a shelter for the night where they were protected from predators.
On the other hand, today I do not feel right if I buy some chicken meat from a supermarket and I imagine that a chicken like those with which I had played as a child would have had to spend all its life in the equivalent of a prison, then be slaughtered to procure me just one day of food.
So I would prefer food that is obtained from living beings whose original lifestyle before domestication was much more appropriate for the requirements of intensive food production, like plants, fungi or even immobile animals, instead of coercing originally mobile animals to live like immobile plants, in order to reduce the production costs.
That's not the vegan reason at all. If it was, it would permit eating free-range chickens as you say, and cows. Meat cows have a great life. They're given plenty of food, protection from predators, and when they are killed, it's much less of a torture than dying naturally from disease, predation, or starvation. Wild animals are more often the ones living in what we humans would see as torture. Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows.
Even humans have lifted ourselves out of our natural environment and created civilization so we're not in a constant daily struggle to not die from violence or starvation. It's a double standard to want that for humans but not for animals.
> wild chicken
This does not exist, chicken is a species made by and for humans. As for cows, pigs, sheeps, most horses…
Most vegan wouldn’t be vegan if industrial farming doesn’t exist.
> What has that broccoli ever done to you?
"Carrot Juice is Murder", Arrogant Worms
I agree with your last point—the Solar Council should have provided conditional aid. The most basic assistance could have removed the justification for cannibalism.
> The Solar Council is primarily interested in putting its own arrogance on display. Its Planetary Aid agent doesn't give a flying fuck about the slaves. That much is obvious.
That isn't entirely clear. There is a lot of context that is elided. Given the time frame, clonized 1000 years ago and this is the first ship ever to visit, transit costs can reasonably be assumed to be very high and the resources available to assist each colony may be low.
The lack of livestock when founding a colony is not unique to this colony but was ubiquitous at the time it was founded. Presumably the approach to lack of livestock is also not unique. It is an entirely plausible that the Solar Council has tried various approaches and reached the conclusion that attempting to change or assist such culures externally is a waste of limited resources and/or actively harmful.
The underlying issue is not the cannibalism, since the Solar Council agent ate the meal and presumably knew or at least suspected when the colony was established. The issue is the way those in power treat their subclass.
Attempting to fundamentally change a planetary scale civilization with limited resources is not something we can safely asssume is feasible.
> How do we know it wasn't a placenta in delicate wine sauce?
I've never seen a placenta described as an "inch-thick steak" by people who have eaten steaks many times before. It is not a thick muscle, and none of the anthropological accounts of disposing placentas mention it tasting like a steak (it is usually prepared in a non-steak fashion), and checking now accounts of it like https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a8465402/american-aft... confirms that it tastes rather unlike a thick beefsteak.
Also, this question is a good example of irrationality in insisting on evaluating pieces of evidence in isolation, rather than as a whole. You see this kind of motivated reasoning a lot in scandals and coverups.
The point the story makes is that there are two possible worlds: one in which there is no slavery, and the various anomalies the visitors observe are simply anomalies (eg. those itinerant fieldworkers really did just happen to have moved on to the next town already); and one in which there is and the local authorities are making every effort to cover it up as part of a systematic, planned campaign of deception and lies. And the visitors are trying to figure out which world they live in.
If they lived in the first world, perhaps it really is just a human placenta, somehow (maybe there's a clever way to prepare it), and it is cannibalism of one of the most harmless sort, or it is some sort of very well-developed vegetarian meat substitute; but combine that with all the other anomalies, and it is immediately obvious they lived in the second world, where it is exactly what it seems - a thick meaty steak from the only adult mammal they have observed on the planet, indicative of an entire social structure gone horribly wrong for a millennium and unfixable without centuries of reconstruction, which is actively manipulating & deceiving them and everything from it should be regarded as further lies & attacks, and it is pointless to do any further inspections or reveal to them what the misteak was.
Insisting on interpreting each point in isolation will yield the wrong answer. "How do you know the fieldworkers are slaves? Can you prove it?" "How do you know it was a steak and not a placenta - prove it!" etc.
> The story is that they had quite the hard time surviving on their planet. If people die trying to survive and there is no other food. Should one chose to die from starvation? Should I be the one to judge here?
To point out the obvious, cannibalizing humans as a normal state of affairs cannot have starvation as an excuse - if you're a human. Because you could just eat what they were eating. You can starve to death in a field of cows because you can't eat grass, and have necessity as a justification, but not in a field of fellow humans eating grapes or wheat or all the other crops implied to be raised successfully and maintain a stable population there... And given trophic efficiency, if starvation were an actual concern, you would feed more humans by not raising any for cannibalism.
> What has that broccoli ever done to you?
False equivalence; generally disingenuous. You're a troll?
Perhaps a better story if , instead of aid being refused, it was limited to fish , oxen, and chicken.
And who would you give the aid to?
That’s why you don’t give them horses, which are easily used as weapons. Provide a means to eliminate the incentive structure that keeps humans as draft animals and livestock by offering a more efficient and effective alternative.
There is no way to directly fix an unjust society from the outside without becoming at least as unjust as what you are trying to fix. So you do your best to distribute the resource, but you know it will initially be controlled by the ones holding the monopoly of force.
The hope that one day there will be an improvement in justice is sufficient to not withhold the possibility.
You are working from an incorrect assumption about your choices.
* Doing nothing is unjust.
* Providing material aid and luxuries to the slave holders/cannibals is unjust.
* Using your presumably superior force to stop murder is not unjust.