The Tomorrow File

Rating:
Summary: Good weekend read;plenty of present-day parallels.
Review:
An amazing and chilling tale! Should be classified as Science Fiction and thus, it is unlike any other Sanders book - not a mystery or a sex-fest, though it has those elements in spades.
Obviously, Sanders had fun with his premise, which (I think) is: What would happen if the Government set about to make its citizenry happy? And at any cost, including active manipulation of individual lives. Imagine Brave New World, with an entertaining mystery, modernized, and taken to the next degree.

Sanders cleverly renames common terms, for example: Males are EM's, females are EF's, sex is "using." This extends to the government - the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has evolved into the "Department of Bliss." (Couldn't happen? - remember the Dept. of Defense used to be called the War Department.)

Definitely will make you glad your government is as inept as it is - after reading TF, you will never ask again for a government that knows what it's doing!

Ken

Rating:
Summary: Hard to understand
Review: Lawrence Sanders is one of my favorite writers, the book, The Tomorrow File, is not worth TRYING to read. I finally gave up.

Rating:
Summary: Good weekend read;plenty of present-day parallels.
Review: Sanders probably isn't writing sci-fi as much as he is using the future setting to avoid libel claims. The focus on youth, intelligence, and information as a source of power are no future stretch. Government's/industry's job is to keep people happy by carefully managing the flow and spin of information, to maximize the benefits,not to the public at large, but to the executives, politicians and bureaucrats. This is best accomplished in a society where most people don't give a rip, unless their own boat is rocked. For parallels,one need only look to the current impact on market indices or consumer confidence measures of a tiny tick in a government-produced labor or inflation statistic, or to the impact on our perception of public safety produced by a favorable crime statistic. Is Nick Flair that much different from Bill Gates/Clinton, in his early appreciation and clever use of the power that derives from control of information? I guess I read this as satire.

Rating:
Summary: Addresses Bill Joy's questions before he asked
Review: Several years ago this author suggested that our country will create a new branch of government - the scientific branch - for the purpose of identifying technolology that should not be pursued...and advising the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government to put that technology into the "tomorrow file" - essentially buried for a future time, when society might be better suited to absorb the consequences.

Excellent concepts.Appropriate material to help consider Bill Joy's observations.

Rating:
Summary: Biological Time Bomb went off back n 1973
Review: To get full impact of The Tomorrow File, try digging up The Biological Time Bomb and comparing with Huxley's Brave New World and Brave New World Revsited.

The read it again -- The Tomorrow File, that is.

I first read The Tomorrow File and The Biological Time Bomb [sorry, can not recall that author's name] in 1973. MAYBE even 1972.

And by 1991 when the paperback re-issue was added to a bookstore across the street that is no more, well, I was seeing evidence every day that folks reading it for the FIRST time in 1991 were already LEFT BEHIND on what's real in "sociology."

Can't fault YOU, Larry. Or Aldous or Julian or even H.G. Welles and Upton Sinclair.

You warned them hard enough. Not that any bodies with the good old "It Can't Happen Here" attitudes ever paid attention.

Nicholas definitely pushed his luck too far. So far, even though thoroughly mind-diddled my own great love and I have stayed relatively free and happy with only the following chatter to show for going on 11 years...