"'The collapse of the Polesotechnic League removed the last barrier against intolerance -'" (p. 382)
That was intolerance against the genetically "perfect" Zacharians. But we did not read about Zacharians while we were reading about the League. Poul Anderson retconned them later. Zacharian-League stories set earlier could have been added later but, as we know, Anderson was withdrawing from the Technic History when he wrote The Game of Empire.
The equivalent group in Robert Heinlein's Future History is the Howard Families, bred for longevity and suffering persecution after going public. The Howards appear only in Volume IV, Methuselah's Children, but we are to understand that they had existed from the late nineteenth century and thus were present in the background throughout Volumes I-III. With the single exception of Andy Libby in "Misfit," Heinlein missed the chance to show that some of the characters in earlier stories had been Howards under their "Masquerade" names.
In James Blish's The Seedling Stars, there is prejudice against "Adapted Men," genetically modified to live on Ganymede and extrasolar planets. However, the Adapted Men cannot live on Earth so that there is little occasion for direct conflict. In James Blish's and Norman L. Knight's A Torrent of Faces, there is prejudice against genetically modified human amphibians.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And it helped, of course, that Anderson retconned the Zacarhians into merely one more ethnicity in an Empire containing thousands of such ethnicities. Meaning the Zacharians sank into resentful obscurity.
Which explains why we see no mention of them in the earlier written stories.
Ad astra! Sean
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