Helen M. Urban 21 min read

There's an axiom in the galaxy: the more complicated the machine, the bigger mess it can make, as when Buughabyta's computer ordered fifteen acres of grain and balanced the budget by catastrophe.

Helen M. Urban's 1962 story is a wry first-contact and social-SF comedy of runaway automation. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial satire where galactic machines make ever grander messes, and the glory of Ippling proves to be one more triumph of magnificent malfunction.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

21 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).