Condition: Acceptable. Please see the images for more details.
Cover art: Wallace Wood
Blurb: “
THE FO
VER MACHINE
(Fermerly published as They'd Rather Be Right)
By Mark Clifton and Frank Riley
BosSY was right. Always. Irrario. y. She was limited only in
that she had to have facts—not cssumptions—with which to work. Given those facts, he conciusions and predictions were i vitably correct.
And at made Bossy a 'ticking bo..
Bossy had been designed as a se vomechanism for guiding airplanes. But she became something much greater: a hy-percomputer. Soon the men who worked with Bossy found themselves able to so' their problems, to erase their prei-udices—in short, to thin.
Did the world welcome Bossy with open arms and glad cries?
No, because for four decades the world had been in the grip of opinion control, and Bossy represented a serious threat to that dominance. So Bossy had to go underground, and work in hiding. Which was why Joe Carter, the world's only true tele-path, and two brilliant Professors had to assume the role of Skid Row bums.
All this is only the beginning of one of the most thoughtfully wriften, and thought provoking, science fiction novels ever writ-ten. I shows convincingly and compellingly, what would happen if everyone in the world were given a single blunt command:
Think or die.
Only a small handful of people are mature enough to realize that they don't know all the answers. And it was only to this handful that Bossy offered the greatest gift of all: immortality.
But all people wanted immortality, wanted it with a fixed and burning desire. And gradually the tension increased, the mobs grew restless, the military became more demanding—and the
'bomb' ticked swiftly on.
And it was up to Joe Carter to stave off catastrophe.
THE FOREVER MACHINE is full of excitement, both physical and mental. It is full, too, of rich rewards for the reader who appreciates genuinely mature philosophy tinged with gentle irony. And among other things, it is that rare event: a science fiction novel based on a brand-new idea.
A GALAXY MAGAZINE Selected Novel