About "Two Boys"

My story Two Boys goes up on Book View Cafe today. I chose that one to put up this time in celebration of the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome. I spoke about that here and here.

The story came about in an odd way. I was approached by an editor to write something for his anthology. The idea of the anthology was to take a bunch of SF writers and have us write upbeat stories that solved the world's problems. The anthology never materialized.

I thought for a long time about this and came up with absolutely nothing. What did I know about curbing global warming? Stop emitting CO2, I suppose. Or world hunger? I guess one could feed people contingent on not having more children-- since that was the root of the problem. Clean up the environment? Hm.

The more I looked at these as "problems" the technical solutions were manifest. We know how to solve these problems. It's not a technical problem. It's a managerial problem.

I came up with two stories for the anthology. Two Boys is one.