Space Age Barbarism

"The Snows of Ganymede," VIII.

Even people whose lives are spent entirely behind airlocks, except when they must don a spacesuit to go outside, are barbarized by lack of books and leisure especially when they are hunted by the civilization from which they have fled and are able to survive only by raiding isolated settlements. Even cannibalism and human sacrifice become possible. Jupiter, dominating the Ganymedean sky, is deified. Opposition to controlled mutation had generated mutiny, civil war and the flight of defeated dissenters but this issue is forgotten by succeeding generations of Outlaws. The powers that be do not exterminate the Outlaws only because an external enemy is sociologically useful.