'The Mad Planet' by Murray Leinster was the first global warming story ever written. Set hundreds of years in the future, Earth has gone mad, CO2 levels have risen across the globe causing a rise in temperature, and human beings have descended to savagery. The change in climate has wreaked havoc with the environment giving rise to new predators and challenges for man. Burl has spent his entire life one step away from oblivion, he's heard the stories about the former greatness of his race, and yearns for a return to that time.
The way we feel about another person, or about objects, is often bound up in associations that have no direct connection with the person or object at all. Often, what we call a “change of heart” comes about sheerly from a change in the many associations which make up our present viewpoint. Now, suppose that these associations could be altered artificially, at the option of the person who was in charge of the process....
There was no stopping General Zarvas’ rebellion. Hunted and hated in two worlds, Hradzka dreamed of a monomaniac’s glory, stranded in the past with his knowledge of the future. But he didn’t know the past quite well enough....
Social living requires the elimination, or at very best, the modification of many elements necessary to survival in “nature”. And when an emergency arises, very often it is the person who would be considered a “criminal”, in other situations, who alone is able to cope with the necessities. If we manage to eliminate “violence” from human affairs, what will we find when a need for “violence” arises—a need outside of man’s artificial control of his environment?
The main trouble is that you’d never suspect anything was wrong; you’d enjoy associating with slizzers, so long as you didn’t know....
“Normality” is a myth; we’re all a little neurotic, and the study of neurosis has been able to classify the general types of disturbance which are most common. And some types (providing the subject is not suffering so extreme a case as to have crossed the border into psychosis) can be not only useful, but perhaps necessary for certain kinds of work....
Psychopathology has offered possible answers to why, from time to time, people in large quantities “see” strange things in the sky which manage to evade trained scientific observers, or conform to what is known about the behavior of falling or flying bodies. And mass hysteria is by no means a product of the present century. But—what if these human foibles were deliberately being exploited?
Yes, Earth may be a sort of fenced-off area, so far as other intelligent races of the galaxy are concerned. But not for the grandiose reasons that some have imagined....
Now, if the animal we know as a cow were to evolve into a creature with near-human intelligence, so that she thought of herself as a “person” …