To veer away from the happy-happy tone of this blog--but not by too much, as I have always made it obvious that I am a fan of strange stories--reading two articles in Le Monde (article no. 1 here and article no. 2 here) got me thinking of the Antonio Cuaron film Children of Men, where Clive Owen lives in a future where human beings have all become infertile.The first piece begins, "The number and the quality of spermatozoa have diminished by about 50 percent since 1950. The incidence of testicular cancer have doubled in the past 30 years. The number of malformation of the masculine genitalia is on the rise..." The culprit? Scientists point to the barrage of chemical substances we are exposed to daily.
We might well be pesticiding and insecticiding ourselves to oblivion, it seems.
Read the article; it's guaranteed to get your brain running. (Maybe use Google Language Tools if you need a translation?) I, for one, have already gotten started thinking of a short story.
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By the way, speaking of short stories, the Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler is up. Editors Charles Tan and Mia Tijam describe it as a "virtual anthology" of speculative fiction in English written by Filipino writers. Cover art is by the very cute (I think) Andrew Drilon. Click and read!
3 commentaires:
oh I've seen bits of that film. disturbing!
What will become of us..first all the forests would die with acid rain, then we would all boil by planetary heating and now we become infertile..ohdeaohdear..
In a way this sounds like good news to me. The globe is already overpopulated, that's a fact. Yes, sometimes I'm very cynic!
minna
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