Wholly Smokes by John Sladek

and a bizarre incident somehow involving a breast implant.
    Buried under an avalanche of lawsuits, GST filed for bankruptcy in October 2011. An American era had ended.
    The End

Chronology
     
    1614     Henry Badcock abducts Pocahontas.
    1665     Enoch and Erasmus Badcock inherit plantations.
    1666     Erasmus Badcock starts Great Fire of London.
    1776     Samuel Badcock’s tobacco starts American War of Independence.
    1862     Tristram Badcock dies in Civil War.
    1865     Jezreel Badcock meets Scarlotta, gets an address in Gettysburg.
    1878     Fillmore Badcock invents the baseball card.
    1885     Fillmore Badcock’s death by tobacco gin (Cleveland).
    1898     Adair Badcock dies in Cuba.
    1898     Blessington Badcock dies in Cuba.
    1917     Augustus Badcock invents Lady Fantasy.
    1937     LeRoy Badcock takes passage on the Hindenburg.
    1937     Augustus Badcock chokes to death on Cairo Cut Plug. Horace (“Boomer”) Badcock takes power.
    1941     Horace Badcock invents Hits cigarettes, becomes two-star general.
    1952     Horace Badcock paints cigarette tar on his grandson’s head.
    1952     Elwood (“Woody”) Badcock begins medical commercials.
    1961     Woody Badcock creates exploding cigar for Castro.
    1975     Dwight Badcock takes over, introduces menthol cigarettes.
    1990s   Dwight Badcock starts Operation Puff Love.
    1998     Death of Dwight Badcock. Dustin Badcock takes power.
    2009     Delmar Birtwhistle’s accident.
    2011     The end of GST.

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Also by John Sladek
     
    Novels
The Reproductive System
(1968) (aka
Mechasm
)
The Muller-Fokker Effect
(1970)
Roderick
(1980)
Roderick At Random
(1983)
Tik-Tok
(1983)
Bugs
(1989)
Wholly Smokes
    Collections
The Steam-Driven Boy
(1970)
Keep The Giraffe Burning
(1977)
Alien Accounts
(1982)
The Lunatics Of Terra
(1984)
Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek
(2001)

John Sladek (1937 – 2000)
    John Sladek was born in Iowa in 1937 but moved to the UK in 1966, where he became involved with the British New Wave movement, centred on Michael Moorcock’s groundbreaking
New Worlds
magazine. Sladek began writing SF with ‘The Happy Breed’, which appeared in Harlan Ellison’s seminal anthology
Dangerous Visions
in 1967, and is now recognized as one of SF’s most brilliant satirists. His novels and short story collections include
The Muller Fokker Effect
,
Roderick
and
Tik Tok
, for which he won a BSFA Award. He returned to the United States in 1986, and died there in March 2000.

Copyright
     
    A Gollancz eBook
    Copyright © The Estate of John Sladek 2003
    All rights reserved.
    The right of John Sladek to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
    This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by Gollancz
    The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
    Orion House
    5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
    London, WC2H 9EA
    An Hachette UK Company
    A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
    ISBN 978 0 575 11067 0
    All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
    No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
    www.orionbooks.co.uk