Going to go read the first story now, "The Great Wall of Mexico," by John Sladek.
4:50 p.m. update: Read it (a little annoyed by the background pattern which made it a little hard to read), and it's frankly terrifying that that was first published in 1973. Almost forty years later, and we're still in the same damn place???
From a writerly point of view, it's quite funny, but maybe didn't need to be quite so long to make its point? Hmm...maybe I don't have as much patience for satire as I should. I did love Gulliver's Travels.
Nifty! I was just the other day noticing that the archives had finally been removed from their site, and being sad about that; I forgot about the Internet Archive.
I’ve been thinking of maybe trying to put together some sort of Sci Fiction preservation project, getting official rights/permissions for all the stories and putting them up on a site of their own with nice formatting and such. Someone tried to do something like that not long ago, but I gather they skipped the getting-permission part; oops.
…Have you read Sladek’s other stuff? Several of my high school friends were big fans of his back then; I liked some of his work a fair bit, but I’m blanking on which. I think I liked the parodies of other writers’ work.