Two events happened in the last week, which spurred me to finish this little project I’ve had in mind for a while.

First, yet another Fert-litter was born, on March 30 in Seattle. Only five this time, so they probably won’t get the endorsements an End-Times-indicating seven would receive. In Brian W. Aldiss' 1965 "The Saliva Tree" the horror was based in the idea of the sheer wrongness of human women having litters of babies. Yet now it’s become routine. Only the escalating size of the numbers is exciting.

Meanwhile, this guy has come out and said what the smart people have already figured out; in an interconnected biosphere with limited resources, there are too many people, and at some point we have to say, “Give it a rest”. In a time when the world is warming, the ice caps are melting, and non-human species die off every day, it seems obvious that people need to put the brakes on the breeding. People are stupid though. Instead of realizing we’re about to hit a wall, we’ll ignore it by celebrating the latest triumph of science over good sense. And we’ll revile Cassandra.













Extra special thanks to Erin for the funky typeface, and to Phil for remembering the Saliva Tree.