ID this (old) Sci-fi short story

Cafe Society
1

Can anyone help me ID an old sci-fi story that I believe I read in one of those Best Of 19xx books while wasting time in a library years ago?

I’d love to see if the book is still in print, since I recall enjoying many of the stories. One that stands out was about a young man living in a future world where people bought life-insurance readily from computers on the street. Only he learns that out of everyone in the world, he’s un-insurable.

Another story I believe was in the same book involved a historian using a time machine to bring modern medicine to the Romans. Fast forward back to the “present” and Earth is hugely overpopulated, oceans drained to make space, etc. The story ends with…

another historian going back in time with a gun to kill the first historian before he can pass along the medical knowledge.

I’m hoping with at least one title I can track down the book.

Thanks!

2

The last line of such a story I read is, “When I die, the world ends.”
I cannot remember the title or author

3

Yes, that certainly sounds like it!

Googling on that line and “uninsurable” gets me this which is how I remember it.

Looks like it’s Prototaph by Keith Laumer.

Now to see if that gets me anywhere.

4

I’ve read the story, but I forget what it’s called. It was written as a parody of “Lest Darkness Fall”.

5

Based on carnivorousplant’s line, I was able to track down all the anthologies that story was published in, and I belive the modern medicine story is The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass by Frederik Pohl.

The only book those stories were in together is 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories editted by Asimov and others.

Thanks, teeming millions!

6

Cool.

7

You know, L. Sprague de Camp (author of he classic Lest Darkness Fall wrote his own dystopian take on the situation. If you can find it, read his short story A Gun for Aristotle.
Harry Turtledove wrote an affectionate take on LDF. I forget what it was called, but it as published together with LDF in a single volume, and the story is about a Roman woman in Republican or Imperial Rome who travels backwards in time to the days of the founding of Rome.

8

I think you may mean To Bring the Light by David Drake. The two stories were published together with an introduction by Turtledove

Turtledove and DeCamp did appear together in Down in the Bottomlands - 2 stories by HT and Wheels of If by DeCamp

9

Cool. I thought, based on those definitions, that I remembered them being in a collection based on the theme of ‘short short stories’, but I couldn’t remember the exact title of the collection or any of the stories you names, so was hesitant to speak up.

(makes note of title to look up the book himself.)