Monday, Oct. 03, 1955

Big Brother, Inc.

PREFERRED RISK (248 pp.)--Edson Mc-Cann--Simon & Schuster ($2.75).

The thing . . .

That ushered in this modern lenience Was the discovery of fire insurance.

The future state is springing even now From the discovery that loss from failure By being spread out over everybody Can be made negligible.

--A Masque of Mercy by Robert Frost It is several years since The Short War, when the H-bombs knocked the world to chaos. Mankind has by now figured out how to prevent war and even to outwit death; that is, The Company has figured it out. With its globe-circling arm of Underwriters, Actuaries, Claim Adjusters, Regional Directors and Expediters, The Company has figured out almost everything. Blue Plate Policy coupons provide for food; Blue Blanket coverage takes care of shelter, clothing and babies; the Blue Bolt "war and disaster complex of policies" insures against all misfortune--all except for the misfortune of being pronounced Class E and therefore "completely uninsurable." Most marvelous boon of all is the "Suspension Vaults." A policyholder stricken with "radiation" poisoning (a common ailment), or dying of disease for which The Company scientists have not yet found a cure, may sign his life into abeyance at the Clinic, receive a simple injection and get himself filed away inside a clear plastic bubble down in the deep-freeze vaults until the time, five or ten or 50 years hence, when a cure is found, and The Company deems him a safe actuarial risk once more.

It is only natural that in return for all this responsibility, The Company has required increasing authority; in fact, The Company and Company Law have come to govern the world, for this is the only really effective way to minimize the danger of war and its surely bankrupting deluge of Blue Bolt claims.

Why people would object to a way of life so free of security worries is beyond young Claim Adjuster Tom Wills, who is sent out from the Home Office to investigate some underground rumblings in The Principality of Naples (The Company finds the old city-state system the most efficient form of organization). But before Tom's mission and Preferred Risk come to a radioactive-dusted, gloomily hopeful end, his attitude toward The Company has undergone an earth-rattling change. He is shocked to learn, for example, that some of the people down in the vaults were not sick at all--they are "political suspendees." And The Company loses Tom to the underground for good when he realizes that The Company actually cultivates occasional small wars, lest people become so secure that they need no insurance at all.

Tom's eye-opening journey through a troubled corner of The Company's world brought Author Edson McCann (pseudonym for "a government scientist") a $6,500 contest prize as 1955's best science-fiction story. But, with its minimum of electronic gadgetry and with no space excursions at all, Preferred Risk stays close to the ground and takes a jitney ride along the broad highway charted by George Orwell six years ago in 1984. Author McCann, throwing politics away as excess baggage, just zips along, fast, wry, and sometimes ingenious.

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