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Notes -
Agreed, but in practice this just boils down to "they don't have nuclear families! Isn't that weird?" It's always sex and sexual relationships, very rarely anything at all unique. Even the truly weird stuff is also usually just sex stuff, such as in Three Worlds Collide the acceptability of rape in future earth culture. Yudkowsky explicitly set out to create a world whose morality would be uncomfortable, and that was the best he could do. Better than most attempts (there were a few other good ideas in that story too) but still boring.
I want to see us really pump the gas on weird societies. I want families who grow fond enough of the family dog to uplift it to human intelligence, then compensate for their previous treatment of it by deliberately decreasing their own intelligence. I want attention-based currency, antimemetic math, a government division tasked with tracking down unlicensed simulations (man-made hells), IQ licenses, etc.
Above all I don't want another setting where wow everyone's really promiscuous, but also prudish about some other non-sex thing, isn't that so interesting?
You have to give some allowance to Heinlein for writing this during the sixties when this actually was novel to some extent. Sixty years down the line it seems stale and cringe (and I felt the same way about Stranger in a Strange Land) but that's at least partially a "Seinfeld isn't funny" phenomenon.
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