Portraits of His Children

Short story collection; what I really noticed in this one was how the basic awfulness of life was correlated to people not doing things as organized groups bound by something other than blood—in some of them, there were governments or government-like structures that explained how we got to space or whatever, but always in the background. Man’s inhumanity to man was not otherwise regulated (also man’s inhumanity to woman, as you might have expected—the brutal rape in one story is apparently not even investigated by the police), which meant it got pretty extreme. For intellectual property nerds, there was one story positing that organized sports were destroyed (by 2016, no less) by 3D modeling of prior players so that you could show more see the exact matchup you wanted any time by computer, which explicitly addressed the relevant IP issues. show less