Too Little Too Late: The Fall of 21st Century Civilization
by Rev. Deet Laser-Printer II
(p) Sphynx Press 2116

Review by Toyota Rabbit

i’m not supposed to have read this book but some dumb-ass acolyte threw up downstairs after eating bad mushrooms. at the beginning of my shift after sixth hour i found a note from the new master google to “deal with the mess in the basement” and he left the gate unlocked for me.

every week i sweep and mop the floors fast, so I can spend more time reading the books before ninth hour when my shift ends, so having this extra chore today pisses me off.

the really old books are kept in the basement, and this blue one looks interesting so I take it and carry it back upstairs and hide it under a shelf.

during my next shift i start reading it and i think it is stupid. it reads like a learning book but there are a lot of words that aren’t in the dictionary and i think the writer made them up to sound important.

i read some more and now i don’t believe it is true. i think the writer is telling a fiction but pretending to be a learning book.
clever trick and now i am interested in what happens next in the story.

well that is stupid. made-up stories are fun but this book is silly. no tribe would ignore warning after warning of coming disaster, year after year after year. here in the city they teach us as soon as we are old enough, to be smart about washing to avoid sickness, being careful about eating and storing food, and closing the gates to the plague rats. i remember old master google talking about how there used to be more people alive in the world – maybe even tens of millions although it doesn’t sound right to me – and that most of them died when the knowledge went away. i really think that if they knew about it early enough – a few years, say – they could have stopped the dark age from happening. so it must have been a sudden thing.

now we have cities and libraries and lessons but we also have mushroom-eating dumb-asses. i want to ask master google if this is “irony” but can’t let him know i took the book.

i have buried the book under the compost. i would not read it a second time.