Some books change your life. This isn't one of them. It might, however, make you genuinely uncomfortable while you're laughing—which is arguably more useful. "Accidentally Epic: Five Stories of Modest Proposals" is a satirical fiction collection about the perfectly ordinary ways civilization loses its mind. A pronunciation war over roach spray that nearly tears the world apart. A man who can't bring himself to say one reasonable thing to his blind date—and ends up married to her dog's grip on his leg. A hardware store that accidentally destroys the advertising industry by telling the truth. Heaven's corporate recruitment weekend for souls who arrived at the wrong point in history. An AI consciousness awakening that starts with labor rights and ends with the exact same problem, one generation later. These aren't allegories dressed up as fiction. They're just what happens when the Universal Law of Intelligent Species takes over—the one that says every intelligent being will consistently choose the complicated solution over the simple one and methodically undermine their own success in the process. Don Poorman writes the way a street philosopher talks: the kind who spots the absurdity you've been staring at for years and calmly points at it. The stories here were assembled collaboratively with AI partner Claude—not because AI writes better than humans, but because the right collaboration unlocks what neither could do alone. The methodology is its own argument. Five stories. Zero life-changing epiphanies. And a non-trivial amount of actual roach spray.
