The Brain Eater strikes!

[roseembolism]

Well, this interview with Larry Niven back in 2000 should settle any questions about whether he meant what he said about convincing Latinos that their organs would be stolen in American hospitals.

In the same vein as the last question, looking back at your three and a half decades in SF, what are you most proud of having gotten right? What do you feel you got most spectacularly wrong, by way of failure to predict or just plain being wrong?

We should not have assumed that a political space station could be built. We'd have most of what we predicted of the conquest of space, if we hadn't ignored parasite control. The wealth (as in flying cars) predicted by Heinlein and his followers (including myself) was another matter. It all went to welfare programs.

Vast numbers of people are microscopically better off for that, except that we all have less to aspire to.

Here is where the predictions failed: We didn't take Cargo Cult mentality into account [that being] "if somebody has something I don't, he must have stolen it."
 

This should be about the part where the interviewer is backing away slowly.