Vonda N. McIntyre (www.vondanmcintyre.com) lives in Seattle, Washington. The biography at her website by Eileen Gunn is a delightful tissue of moonshine. She attended the original Clarion workshop in Pennsylvania at the start of the 1970s, and thereafter founded the original Seattle Clarion. She became famous for her innovative short fiction and for her novel Dreamsnake (1977), and then for her bestselling Star Trek novels in the 1980s, for her Starfarers novels in the early 1990s, and for her Nebula Award-winning The Moon and the Sun (1997). Sometime in the early 1980s she stopped writing short fiction, so a year such as 2005, in which two McIntyre stories were published, is rare.
“A Modest Proposal” was published in Nature. The author says that the full title includes “for the Perfection of Nature.” It has the same finely controlled, moderate, reasonable, deadpan tone as its literary model by Jonathan Swift. So it is possible that someone could take it seriously as a good idea. But remember Swift’s proposal to slaughter and eat the poor, and don’t.