Science fiction tales some humorous & some not-so-funny about the downside of the future—and how to deal with a universe ruled by Murphy&s Law!
Includes:: stories by Robert A Heinlein Sarah A Hoyt Fritz Leiber Gordon R Dickson Lester del Rey Christopher Anvil Fredric Brown & more WHAT COULD GO WRONG ? Progress! It’s wonderful—though it sometimes has unexpected & undesirable side effects Read the long warning list of possible side effects on a medicine bottle’s label sometime the part in really tiny print But surely the benefits of modern technology outweigh the drawbacks Until they don’t Remember how increasingly deadly weapons from the machine gun to the H-bomb were supposed to make war too horrific to even be contemplated? Didn’t happen The cell phone has made it possible to phone from almost anywhere—too bad if you wanted to be out of reach & civilization is so big & complicated that a breakdown of any part can have disastrous consequences Modern transportation makes it possible to get anywhere in a hurry though traffic jams & overextended airports may slow the hurry part to a crawl & it also can ensure that a new disease can go all over the planet in a few days Then there’s the sheer complexity of society itself from interminable waits at the DMV to trying to get tech help on the phone (“ Your call is important to us ”) & that’s just the present day What new technologies new ways of organizing (or disorganizing) society new confused & confusing government bureaucracies new ways for small disgruntled groups to wreak havoc & worse will the future bring? Will privacy keep eroding? Could computers & robots take over? Maybe they wouldn’t want to & if the pace of modern life is driving you batty just wait to see what’s on the horizon Exploring such scary yet fascinating possibilities are such masters of science fiction as Robert A Heinlein Sarah A Hoyt Fritz Leiber Gordon R Dickson Lester del Rey Christopher Anvil Fredric Brown & more writers who have seen the future—and it may not work