Hi, again.
Jack Vance wrote a wonderful story, "Abercrombie Station," about a space
station where everyone -- owners, visitors, and staff -- is obese, with many
lyrical descriptions of the gentle, spherical shapes that fat people take on
in zero gravity... the protagonist is a thin, ruthless girl recruited to
seduce the owner of Abercrombie Station, who is known to have a thing for
freaks...
Great story with a tough sympathetic female lead (unlike some of Vance's
stories!)
This story was also published in a Asimov and Greenberg anthology, _THe
Science Fiction Weight Loss Book_, which is presumably chock-full of stories
about obesity (even though no one in story has any desire to lose weight!)
You might also show them the Williamsdorf Venus (spelling?), the
original "Earth Mother," and point out that through most of human life on
Earth, a fat person would have been a thing of wonder... I know that until
contact and colonization here in Hawaii, the only fat people were the chiefs
and their wives, and fatness was greatly admired. Technological
civilization, and the millenia-long drop in food prices that accompanied it,
are responsible for making fatness an option for everybody in the developed
world and thus making *thinness* the marker for high status...
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:16 PDT