Still pondering over this one
Reverting once more to the issues I was thinking over in Tuesday's post -
- and there was definitely something for me about magic bullets and quick fixes and be careful what you wish for in that posited question.
I'm not saying precisely Monkey's Paw territory, but definitely maybe Unintended Consequences, and there are various versions of this in folklore and in sff.
That thing of a simple blanket solution without working through and without infrastructure -
I was thinking partly of that episode in Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven where the fix for racial prejudice is to turn everybody in the world the same shade of grey -
And partly some other works from around the same period which were looking at the problems with Magic Bullets and that these did not come detached from wider socio-economic structures and had unintended consequences.
I am not going to say, 'no-one reads Angus Wilson any more', because that is the kind of statement I am constantly deriding myself, but I am under the impression that the late Sir Angus is somewhat of a neglected figure (I may be wrong and at the moment there are multitudes of PhDs in progress on the dear fellow). Anyway, his 1973 novel As If By Magic has as one strand in the plot the effects of the introduction of a super-high-yield strain of rice (named 'Magic') developed by one of the POV characters on various developing economies - it is very far from 100% benign.
Then my adored Naomi Mitchison dealt with this in both Solution Three (1975) and Not By Bread Alone (1983), in both of which the solution is one that is not once and forever, but requires rethinking and adjustment.
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