![]() Information put a premium on knowledge and brainpower, as well as on human creativity. As the American sociologist Daniel Bell put it in 1973, the new society was one where ‘what counts is not raw muscle power, or energy, but information’, where the new professionals would be producing immaterial goods. One thing that the computer revolution brought was a certainty that industrial society was changing, or even about to be finished. The anxieties of their literature in this period reflected a society preoccupied with technology and cybernetics, an unlikely bastion of the information society that arose on both sides of the Iron Curtain from the 1970s onwards. Writers such as Nikola Kesarovski (who wrote the above murder mystery) and Lyuben Dilov grappled with questions of the boundaries between man and machine, brain and computer. The genre was flourishing in small Bulgaria in the last two decades of socialism, and the country became the biggest producer of robotic laws per capita, supplementing Isaac Asimov’s famous three with two more canon rules – and 96 satirical ones. The explanation thus also becomes more logical: the killer was a robot. ![]() You will not find this strange murder case in the crime pages of a local US newspaper, however, but in a Bulgarian science-fiction story from the early 1980s. ![]() A murderer with no motive, and one who seemed genuinely distraught at what he had done. A famous writer murdered in a South Dakota restaurant full of diners the murder weapon – a simple hug. The police report would have baffled the most grizzled detective. ![]()
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