Eight stories of technology run amok

Jeff Somers is the author of the Avery Cates series, The Ustari Cycle, Lifers, and Chum (among many other books) and numerous short stories.

At the B&N Reads blog he tagged eight accounts of technology run amok, including:

Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut is a master at presenting horrific, dystopian, and disturbing premises with so much cranky humor, you almost forget how awful his imagined worlds were. In Player Piano, automation has made human labor in almost any form obsolete. While that sounds pretty good on a Monday morning when the alarm goes off, what it means in practice is billions of people all over the world living on welfare and bored out of their minds. In a world where self-driving trucks are delivering our beer, we’d all best start making plans for how to fill our spare time when all we have is spare time.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Player Piano is among Luke Rhinehart's five favorite sci-fi satires.

--Marshal Zeringue