Harry Harrison 39 min read

'We're losing a planet, Neel, I can't understand it,' the very old man says. But Societics is an exact science, Neel protests; surely it's just a matter of working the k-factor equations correctly.

Harry Harrison's 1960 story is a clever hard-SF and social-SF tale of a science of society. Sharp, thoughtful golden-age SF. Read it for a story where planetary stability is managed by a precise mathematics of human behavior, and a world sliding toward disaster tests whether Societics is truly exact, or merely arrogant.

In its time

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

Reading it

39 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).