In Fiction
Cyril M. Kornbluth's 1951 short story The Marching Morons is an example of dysgenic fiction, describing a man who accidentally ends up in the distant future to find out that dysgenics has resulted in mass stupidity. Mike Judge's 2006 film Idiocracy has the same premise, with the main character the subject of a military hibernation experiment that goes awry, taking him 500 years into the future. While in the Kornbluth short story civilization is kept afloat by a small group of dedicated geniuses, their function has been replaced by automated systems in Idiocracy.
Read more about this topic: Dysgenics
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)