Skepticism, Science & Pseudoscience

60 years now (I'm 66) and I don't think I've run across anything quite like that. There have been a couple of novels, the names and authors of which escape me, that have some sort of fundamentalist religion happening. Well, one whose name and author I do know is Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.

There are some novels out there that involve a reversion to a kind of dark ages after some sort of holocaust. The already mentioned A Canticle for Liebowitz is certainly one of those. Another is The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett, which is still in print and can be gotten from Amazon. It's probably been at least fifty years since I last read it, so I can't remember enough to recommend it.

I can't recall the author or the title (dammit!), but a while back someone wrote a book in which a technology was invented that essentially made it impossible for people to lie. As I recall, everyone wore a bracelet of some sort that then glowed red (if I remember correctly) when the wearer told an untruth. In the novel this was presented as A Good Thing, because truth telling is always best, right? It doesn't deal with the loss of the polite social lie, (Honey, does this dress make me look fat?), nor does it address the situation where a person may sincerely believe something that is not true (Obama is a Muslim). I found the societal implications to be far scarier than the author had ever thought out.

Same guy wrote another book in which immortality was essentially achieved, at least in the first world, and again did not fully deal with the actual consequences of that.