The Year of the Jackpot

Short and fun old-fashioned science-fiction. It plays with the idea of statistics predicting instability. Probably an exciting new idea in the 50s, when communications where giving access to much more information about the world to the average man. Local news suddenly became part of something bigger.

Interesting to read today, with all the Big Data movement and the real capacity to crunch huge amount of data!

Although I didn't remember any details something about this story seemed very familiar. I must have read it before in the dim, distant past. It's a classic fifties SF story with two main characters: the male who knows nearly everything and the female who leads rescuing. Society is falling apart and disasters are happening everywhere. Is there any hope for mankind?

The short essays included about Galaxy magazine, SF novellas and novelettes, the author, and the foreword by Paul di Filippo are pretty good, maybe more interesting than the story. But do read the story before the Foreword.