I hope this doesn’t come across in totally an awful way, but I appreciated some of the points those freakier books were trying to make about the incest taboo. It struck me that he was trying to illustrate how that taboo was useful to prevent genetic problems with inbreeding, and that once those potential problems were ironed out through Science and Reason, then there would be no practical reason why the taboo should still exist. Of course, this totally ignores (or badly misrepresents) issues of power and authority and exploitation and all the other issues that make recreational sex with family members so off-putting to society, even when procreation is effectively prevented. Were he still alive today, I imagine he might put more emphasis into trying to represent his incestuous filial characters as somehow possessing full competence and agency for consent (even the underage ones) since I expect he thought it was only a logical progression of evolved reasonable thought. It’s not like he didn’t represent his young characters that way back then (after all, Lorelei Lee and Lapis Lazuli both attempt to seduce Lazarus while he initially resists, since they don’t think there’s anything wrong with it), but he didn’t do it convincingly. Part of the reason for that is that (in Time Enough For Love particularly) all his characters seem to speak with the exact same voice, so they all seem to blithely serve whatever point RAH is trying to make. Another reason is that RAH is the guy who, through his characters, claims that “Geniuses and supergeniuses always make their own rules about sex as on everything else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers,” which is simultaneously self-serving (for geniuses) and self-congratulatory (for implying that one is a genius for thinking so).
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