Writers throughout history seem to be drawn to the topics of vampires and living forever. While living forever might be appealing if you could live forever at the age of 25, old enough to do anything and young enough to recover from it, but the story of Eos and Tithonas does come to mind. It should come as no surprise people with good or enjoyable lives trying to live forever. I guess this is why writers attribute such a level of evil to those having money, privilege and power since they usually had to be some kind of evil to amass such quantities of each.
The vampire theme finds its way into stories or genre which have nothing to do with vampires. The Deathwalker story in Babylon 5 comes to mind. There is always the cautionary part of the tale stating cannibalizing some or all of a human leads to nasty side effects on those who engage in the practice. You might recall in “The Book of Eli” that people who ate too much human flesh developed shakes.
From time to time this vampire/cannibal concept leaks from the pages of fiction into real life and not just in those crazy news stories about small bands of cannibals found in the news but heavily funded research attempting to extend human life indefinitely.
Recently I stumbled into an article in Time magazine about young blood transfusions. Yes, that is pretty much what got me thinking about this. These are people with significant amounts of cash buying/taking/somehow obtaining blood from the young and transfusing it into themselves. We now have a reality caught somewhere between the fiction of vampires and the fiction of the Wraith on Stargate Atlantis. The Wraith could go into hibernation allowing the human populations to build up naturally until they were sufficient in size for a “culling.”
This move towards “harvesting” from the young is something all writers should be writing about, not just science fiction writers. It is a dangerous precedent and shows just how far the ethics of those with money and power have sunk.