334/Emancipation

"Emancipation" (subtitle: "A Romance of the Times to Come") is the fourth section of 334. It first appeared separately in New Dimensions #1, 1971.

Summary

Milly Holt and Boz Hanson, a successful married couple, have become hostile and sexually insecure. Boz spends some time apart, reconnecting with his mother and sister, and pursuing random flirtations. After a manipulative couples-therapy session, Milly and Boz decide to have a child via artificial gestation, with Boz being physically modified to be able to breastfeed; the experience brings them together at last.

Related characters

Millie's ex-lover Birdie disappeared at the end of "The Death of Socrates"; Shrimp and the rest of Boz's family are major characters in the 334 novella.

Notes

four o'clock art movies

Porn is readily available, despite the lack of an Internet.

thinking of one hundred and thirty-one different ways to use a brick in ten minutes

An example of how to do well on the Skinner-Waxman creativity test.

that death-house on 12th Street

The euthanasia facility seen in 334 Part VI (43). Freely available assisted suicide (or at least somewhat available; the final monologue in 334 indicates that not all applications are approved) is also a feature of Make Room! Make Room! (1966); it was a fairly common theme in 20th-century SF, though more often in an involuntary form imposed by tyrannical governments, as in Pebble in the Sky (1950).

1967, the year the first man landed on the moon

Mrs. Hanson is misremembering either the year of her own birth, or the actual year of the lunar landing (1969); this isn't a misprint, since she goes on to spell it out. As mentioned earlier, space exploration is now a thing of the past.

a hygiene demonstrator

The exact nature of this job is clarified a few pages later: "I demonstrate sex in the high schools."

before I got married I was Independent

By analogy with Democrat and Republican, Independent is bisexual.

a couple authenticated Saroyans

Aram Saroyan, whose concrete poems sometimes consisted only of one or two words.

tell me about your sex life

In earlier editions, "sexlife" was one word— probably intentional, since shortening a modern phrase is a common science fiction practice for implying that that subject will be even more common in casual conversation in the future than it is today.

a Republican speaking at a testimonial dinner for Adlai Stevenson

This very anachronistic reference is probably to Adlai Stevenson II, whose eloquent advocacy for liberal positions in the 1950s and 1960s inspired a passionate but inadequate following: he lost the Presidential primary twice, and a subsequent "draft Stevenson" campaign also went nowhere. Dr. McGonagall—a gay man who believes that all men are essentially heterosexual—is being compared to a contrarian supporter of an idealized Democrat whom most Democrats did not support.

at one point there were four teevee series about zombies

In 1971 this was actually a somewhat farfetched idea, since zombies were not yet a cultural craze; only one Night of the Living Dead movie had appeared.