Seven Improved Science Fiction Stories

I have no idea how familiar people are with the ‘classic’ scifi stories which used to be staples at scifi conventions. But you may recognize some of the pieces below.

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“I Have No Mouth And I Must Text”: The last surviving members of humanity, maybe, are trapped somewhere bad, really bad, or something, but they have cellphones and good service, so they don’t really notice,

“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelets”: A touching tale of those who go to an independently-owned Thai restaurant when they could have gone to Denny’s. Some say it’s a subtle comment on human nature and dystopia, whereas some believe it is part of LeGuin’s perpetual battle against Waffle House.

“We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”: Philip K. Dick frightens us. We’re not messing with this one.

A Sound of Thumper – While time travel is now perhaps one of the very oldest science fiction themes, we’re all influenced by Ray Bradbury’s touching homage to Bambi’s bunny companion, which postulates a duet album between Thumper and Leonard Nimoy.

The Gold Equations – A stowaway finds that if you can’t pay your fare, there is no choice: you have to wash an amount of dishes equal to the logarithmic multiplier of the amount of oxygen you take up, leading to the expression “No waste of space in space”.

Nightfell – The little known prequel to “Nightfall”, it consists entirely of Isaac Asimov saying, “You are getting sleepy…sleepy…good. Now postulate a world where people are capable of sleeping with their eyes closed, but can’t actually conceptualize darkness. It’s a great story for some reason, but it’s weirdl

The Midas Plague – This is a 1954 story by Frederik Pohl about a horrifying world where robots make too much high-quality goods and people suffer horribly from a superabundance of plenty. It doesn’t make them depressed or materialistic; they just believe that having lots of stuff makes you poor, so they hate having limousines and fancy food forced on them.

As far as I know, they didn’t have easy access to marijuana in 1954, but what do I know?