A tale of two stories: warnings from the not-so-fiction future for modern day.
The Book:
101 Science Fiction Stories, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Charles G. Waugh, and Jenny-Lynn Waugh with an introduction by Isaac Asimov. Published by Avenel Books, New York, 1986.
Story #1: “Cinderella, Inc.” by Christopher Anvil (page 61)
In some future age, people pay thousands of dollars to Cinderella, Inc., a company with a secretive medical procedure that turns you into someone perfectly beautiful, adjusting your body to be slender and your face to be lovely or handsome, depending on if you were a man or a woman. You can only maintain your beauty as long as you continue to take the pill the company provides to you once the transformation has occurred.
A man and a woman wow the attendees of a wedding due to their physical perfection. On their wedding night, they both secretly take their pills, neither revealing to the other that they were only average, maybe even “ugly” before they spent all their money to be beautiful. They believe they have married up, latching onto a beautiful physical specimen they’d never have gotten without the medication.
No indication was given as to the condition of their personalities.
Story #2: “The Saga of DMM” by Larry Eisenberg (page 527)
A scientist, while studying a macromolecule that suddenly split into a double helix, creates the most delicious, perfect, irresistible substance in the world, but unfortunately has 100,000 calories an ounce. Once a person tastes it, they cannot resist and soon the world is full of excessively obese people everywhere. It affects the ability of the nations to function, and a third-world country that had no access was easily able to drive out occupying armies because they were so obese.
The scientist who discovered DMM never sampled it, and eventually discovers that it is highly unstable and breaks down into something more volatile than nitroglycerin. Every human being has become a living bomb, simply waiting to explode. He heads for the mountains to be away from humanity when the inevitable happens. Last line of the story: “…somebody sneezed.”
For some reason, I’ve remembered these two stories for decades. But I got to thinking about plastic surgery, GLP-1 injections, our incessant pursuit for physical perfection and pleasure, and while I cannot perfectly extract a metaphor (it would be far too clumsy for me to do so), I believe readers can come up with their own interesting possibilities.
I’ve been sneezing quite a lot, the last couple of months. Blaming it on the extreme low indoor relative humidity that characterizes winter in my part of the country. Fortunately, no explosions.
So far.