How to Save the World

There's no question mark in this book's title. The stories gathered under it won't politely request permission to play with your head. They're not asking you, they're telling you! In the gutsy tradition of the best science fiction speculation, they'll confront your assumptions and force you to discard the thoughtless certainties of everyday life. In thirteen stimulating tales, some of SF's brightest thinkers entertainingly challenge you to stretch your mind around the answers that might shape your future.

Sometimes light in tone but always serious in subject, these 13 SF stories present modest proposals for ending racism, reducing hostility, restoring the environment, benefiting from space travel and otherwise improving the world?or, at least, preserving it. Overwhelmingly, the stories are not simple wish-fulfillment, although "Higher Education," by Jerry Pournelle and editor Sheffield (Cold As Ice ), risks that. Many of the tales show well-laid plans going astray, as in Brenda Clough's "The Product of the Extremes" and Geoffrey Landis's "The Meeting of the Secret World Masters," two of the best entries here. Others highlight the temptation of solutions that may be worse than the problem, as in Mary Turzillo's "The Guatemala Cure," in which an abused woman seeks vengeance against all men. When plans succeed, sometimes it is by trickery?as in James P. Hogan's "Zap Thy Neighbor" or Arlan Andrews's "Souls on Ice"?but technology can prove beneficial as well, as shown in Nick Pollotta's "Raw Terra" and Doug Beason's "Defense Conversion." While outstanding prose surfaces only in the Kathe Koja and Barry Malzberg collaboration ("Buyer's Remorse"), this collection, while perhaps not up to saving the world, should at least save its readers from a few perhaps otherwise empty hours.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This collection of 13 cautionary tales by genre luminaries including James P. Hogan, Barry N. Malzberg, and Lawrence Watt-Evans offers a plethora of good advice on a timely topic: the state of the planet.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Not all technological schemes inevitably spell doom for humanity, according to the authors of these optimistic speculations on how science just might save the world, after all. James P. Hogan's "Zap Thy Neighbor," for instance, features a handheld "zapper" that targets diagreeable people for extinction, which makes for a kinder, safer society. In Nick Pollotta's wacky "Raw Terra," a substance that instantly devours detritus in polluted water exposes the submerged crimes of an almost ubiquitous Mafia. Other outstanding selections include Geoffrey Landis' wry "Meetings of the Secret World Masters," which describes how a clique of biologists unleashes a series of genetically altered viruses to eliminate offensive behavior, and "Higher Education," editor Sheffield's collaboration with Jerry Pournelle, an absorbing tale of a delinquent turned space-mining cadet. Contributions from sf veterans Larry Niven, Barry Malzberg, and Lawrence Watt-Evans help fill out this entertaining set of solutions to civilization's thornier problems that is guaranteed to both amuse and provoke thought. Carl Hays