Michael Knowles

Where alcohol is forbidden.

Ditto.

But sex is promiscuous and encouraged, albeit regulated.

An acknowledgement may be that, you know, booze and drugs and stuff, that's really extrinsic to our nature.

People like them, but it's not.

Whereas sex is really part of our nature, and so any serious

totalitarian system is going to make sense of that.

Any perfectly rationalist utopia is going to have to account for that in some way.

And the way they account for it is they assign you a polycule on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the rest of the time, you know, you're sitting by yourself.

In fact, I have a line here.

This is in the Penguin edition, 185.

You have our protagonist saying,

If only I had a mother the way the ancients had.

I mean my own mother.

And if for her I could be not the builder of the integral and not number D-503 and not a molecule of one state, but just a piece of humanity, a piece of her own self, trampled, crushed, outcast.

And suppose I do the nailing or they nail me.

Maybe that's all the same, but she would hear me.

And she would hear what no one else hears.

And her old lips, her old wrinkled lips of the whole novel, that line really struck me, really resonated with me.

And I thought, my goodness, we're living in an age today where people will cry out and are crying out, in fact, to say, well, if only I had a mother the way the ancients had her.