At 20:00 7/15/97 -0700, you wrote:
>At 2:39 AM 7/15/97, Anny Middon wrote:
>
>>To put this firmly on-topic, has any sf been written that utilizes the
>>inability of undernourished women to conceive?
>
>Well, drat, I probably *should* have in WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD --
>although unless I had gone on to "explain" that this factor had led to
>the propagation of women who had a higher tolerance for undernourishment
>and so could still conceive, I would have had to have junked the whole
>story, since most likely there wouldn't have been any Holdfast people!
>
>Does anybody know if the Ik people, who were written about years ago as
>living in conditions as close to total starvation as exist anywhere,
>still do exist, and if so how they have coped with/gotten around/managed
>to keep their numbers up in spite of being starved all the time, if indeed
>they have? The book was a sensation, and then nothing was ever heard
>again about these victims of a government program that had uprooted them
>from their lands and forcibly settled them someplace else where they
>literally could not produce any food for themselves (at least that's how
>I remember the story -- it was years ago now, a true horror story).
>
>Suzy
>
The last I heard about that, someone had pretty well proved that the
whole scandal had been either invented or exaggerated -- that no group
actually like the Ik had even existed. (But that could be counter-
propaganda.) Anyone have a recent take on this?
Martha Bartter
Truman State University
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:27 PDT