Mallworld

This blast from the past is a collection of short stories from the early 1980's. The scenario is this: Centuries from now, the human race will be visited by an advanced race called the Selespridar. They'll shunt the solar system into a parallel universe to keep us in quarantine as they (slowly)

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judge whether humanity has evolved enough to become part of the greater pan-galactic civilization. Considering the stories in this book center around 30-kilometer-long shopping mall in the vicinity of Jupiter, you can probably guess that we have a ways to go.

The tales of Mallworld are amusing, though they elicit more of a quick grin than any LOLs. (Of course, they were written before LOLs, so that might be a factor.) Many of those are anachronisms/malapropisms committed by characters in their references to our ancient era. The overall purpose of the collection seems to be to take pot-shots at the vapidness of American consumer society while telling tales of common people confronting the crushing pressures brought to bear by wealth and power and winning peace and contentment in the end. There's a lot of worse things you could be reading.
--J.

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