no free will

[tellme2]

hi,hope someone can help with a short story i read about 16 years ago-basically it goes like this;a guy is walking down the street and picks up a piece of paper,when he reads it he loses his free will and has to obey instructions.he gets roped into an alien game and gets very damaged and eventually dies.the story is told through a series of instructions from the alien.i would dearly love to read the story again and some more from the same author.thanks

[admin]

I don't remember the story you are looking for, but the recent novel by Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End, is about a YGBM technology, where YGBM stands for You Gotta Believe Me, a teachnology that forces a person to believe what he is told.

Great book!

[sfreadergrl]

There's also Damon Knight's "Why Do Birds?" where a guy is given a ring by aliens that makes people believe him. He talks everyone on the planet into building and getting into large containers in coldsleep or something similar. And Joe Haldeman has a mind control story, I forget the device used but not sure it's paper.
And then there is the Monty Python skit about the world's funniest joke that makes people die laughng so it's translated into German and given to British soldiers in WWII one word each and they say their words in sequence and German soldiers die laughing. Each Brit has a paper with his German word on it.