Title: How to get to the future before it gets to you
First published: 1974
Description: In this new and challenging book the author of the celebrated best-selling book, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (which became the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical), provides a daring and amusing antidote to those Doomsday prophets who believe that man is destined to destroy himself and planet earth.

Shepherd Mead quickly proves that "natural" isn't necessarily good; demonstrates how to use "population" against people (or just how many can we stand?); and describes how to become a scourge of environment-busters.  

Highlighting his narrative with amusing and telling anecdotes, Mr. Mead discusses new energy concepts, sophisticated waste-disposal systems that reclaim everything (even the garbage), frozen and instant electricity, multispectral photography, and some far-out ideas of his own in the area of communications and do-it-yourself ecology.

In a lighter vein, he suggests a Pleasure Index as a replacement for GNP (Gross National Product); describes how we can keep people from a future that's already in the past; how the future home can be an electric and electronic paradise--or hell (depending on the individual viewer); electric education and the university in decades to come; improving people through "germinal choice"; benevolent brainwashing; the Shepherd Mead Symbiotic Super Box, transduction, and advanced cloning.

Then there's the very special Magical Population-Reducing People Crib (it's really wild and guaranteed to discourage child-bearing); Super Sports Heroes of the Future (part man and part animal--like the greatest middle distance runner in history who won an Olympic gold medal and the Kentucky Derby. And he can run with or without a jockey. Or the great Australian female high jumper who qualified with two kids in her pouch, but was later disbarred when she was caught shaving).

Sexual-social problems in the future also come under the keen scrutiny of Mr. Mead. What will become of sin when we have pleasures (outlined in intimate detail) that are not sinful according to the current rules--but are many times more ecstatic than those associated with sex? Mr. Mead presents an exciting new Sexual Bill of Rights; provides tips on how to condition your wife/husband to get him/her to bow to your will; how to make a mistress of your computer--and how Doomsday can help us all.
Subjects: Human ecology, Twentieth century, Forecasts
LC classification: CB161 .M42