Please excuse me for jumping back into this discussion
and blame me for my warped sense of humour - but reading
your posts about technology I can't resist this old
joke that I've just come across while cleaning out the
desk in my study. I apologise for it ahead of time.
Here goes:

A new ALDI supermarket opened in Toowoomba recently.
It has an automatic water mister to keep the produce fresh.
Just before it goes on, you hear the distant sound of
thunder and the smell of fresh rain. When you pass the milk
cases, you hear cows mooing and you experience the scent of
freshly cut hay.

In the meat department, there is the aroma of charcoal
grilled steaks and bratwurst.

When you approach the egg cases, you hear hens cluck and cackle
and the air is filled with the pleasing aroma of bacon and eggs
frying.

The bread department features the tantalizing smell of freshly
baked bread and cakes.

I don't buy toilet-paper there anymore!

Delightful joke, Lexi
Ah, so much of interest and food for thought.
csteele: "I wonder if there were the same concerns when the telephone was introduced? Disembodied voices down scratchy lines."
Our first telephone was a 'party' line, shared with four other families. my best friend's mother worked the manual exchange. as 12 year olds we's sometimes helped: plug in the lines, ask 'number please' connect and press the lever long, short, short, or whatever the code was. His mother listened in to conversations and spread gossip, and the other people on our line listened to ours. I've been left with a phobia about telephones and avoid making personal calls to this day.
Poirot: 'We have taken away their freedoms and their sense of independence - valuable tools in development. ' More importantly, perhaps, especially for boys, we've removed the possibility of danger and adventure. There are fences around all the dangerous escarpments we used to scale and perch on as kids.
csteele: 'Time will tell if they end up living more, or less, fulfilled lives than we have.' As a teenage Sci-Fi fan, I vividly recall one future scenario in which humans lived alone in small cells, comfortable, all services provided, spending their days communicating all over the planet with friends by vid-com. Robots prevented them leaving their rooms, but no one wanted to anyway. Except for one fellow who, braving death, managed to escape to the top of the vast warren, then heave open a trapdoor to be confronted by the wondrous spectacle of blue skies, fresh air, life, space and nature... At the time I thought it a little far fetched, now I see it has already happened in many of the world's vast cities where people are trapped [by fear of violence, age, infirmity, sloth] in tiny apartments spending a large part of their days emailing, facebooking and twittering [what an apt name]. I communicate with a couple of them from pity.

ybgirp,

It's often the case that sci-fi foretells the future with uncanny accuracy.

csteele,

Just a thought...poor Grenouille would never have coped in an online world. He hated people, but his sense of smell was his means of identifying their type.....no recourse to smell in online interaction.

Yes, phones, photography and the like must have seemed miraculous (still does to me somehow) I remember another of Proust's musings on the telephone, which was new to Paris when he was writing...I'll dig it out. I remember him being incredulous that you could pick up a device and talk to someone far away.

Dear ybgirp and Poirot,

I think you both sell science fiction short, it not only has a habit of accurately predicting the future it often inspires it.

Any fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation would have seen iPads in the hands of the characters 23 years ago. And all inspired because the original set designers didn't have the budgets for knobs.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/08/how-star-trek-artists-imagined-the-ipad-23-years-ago.ars

My current favourite SF author is Ian M Banks. His characters are often very dark but incredibly well written.

I have a feeling your plot ybgirp while sounding Phillip K Dick-ish was possibly an Asimov story.

The good ones certainly stay with you. One I remember vividly was a planet with a large jelly like mass that resided in a cave and where people went to be consumed by it. They offered up full confessions and then stepped into it to be absorbed. Their souls were preserved and could converse with others including past relatives. A heaven on earth. The only proviso was you had to enter it alive. So the people became extremely cautious and risk adverse.

However the tale I feel is most pertinent to our conversation thus far is about sex, tribes, risk and the future fulfilling fiction. It was in an Australian SF anthology I read as a teenager and I have yet to rediscover the book or this particular writer.

The story goes something like this.

There was a drug company who had created a small blue pill (it may have been for sexual dysfunction though that might be the future rejigging the past) but it had a side effect, it turned men's penises bright blue. 

The drug company was of course sued right royally but as it was a typically wealthy drug company the case danced around the courts for years, decades in fact. 

As the huge quantities the pills that had been produced were evidence, the courts ordered they not be destroyed until the case was concluded.

Cont...

Cont...

 So the company decided they would be all stored on a pacific island complete with armed guards, dogs and razor wire to prevent more blue penises joining the class action.

Money was paid to the island's chieftain as rent but the islanders had no idea about the pills, their side effects or the legal situation. All that the young men of the tribe knew was something that required that much protection must be valuable. 

So they chanced their luck against the guards, the dogs and the wire to steal some. A few were shot, many chickened out but the brave few who made it all ended up with, you guessed it, bright blue penises.

And didn't the young women of the tribe simply adore those young men. The brighter the blue the more attractive to the opposite sex they became.

Over the years it became a rite of passage for the young men of the island and the term penis envy took on a whole new hue.

Then one day news arrived that the judge had thrown out the class action but ordered the company to pay a substantial amount to the islanders as he had learnt about the deaths.

So what did the chief, a wise man do? He waived the settlement fee on the proviso the company keep the pills in storage on his island, and that the guards were to be paid in perpetuity to act as before. It had become ingrained in the culture of his people.

Perhaps reading this as a hormone addled teenager might explain a little of its impact on me but I thought it was terrific.

I have often wondered if the maker of Viagra, in choosing the final colour of their pill had ever read the story.

csteele,
Blue penises sound rather fetching… An interesting tale about prejudice and sexual repression, very appropriate for Australia. Science Fiction has been virtually the only secular ‘moral compass’ for people like me who are unable to accept that pleasing an irascible, irrational, invisible superman in the sky is a sane basis for making moral decisions.
I certainly don’t sell sci-fi short. In many ways it was a lifesaver, allowing me to feel OK about being/thinking/acting differently from others. The story could have been by Asimov, however I was also a collector of the many monthly Sci-Fi short story paperbacks that appeared until the late fifties, so perhaps it was in one of them… Many of these anthologies are now available free from e-book sites such as http//manybooks.net. gutenberg.. etc. Most are a bit silly in hindsight, but all are mind expanding in some way. Star Trek, like Star Wars and most such films, spent much time on war at the expense of other problems facing humanity.
Theodore Sturgeon remains my ultimate favourite moral and inventive writer, especially with his ‘Venus plus X’ and ‘More than Human’. Heinlein, too, opened many a reader’s eyes to the possibilities of moralities far more satisfactory than the repressive regimes under which most humans continue to cower.
Back to ‘Smells’, Was there an uplifting moral alternative suggested in the book? Or was it simply an observation of the nature of humanity?