Report of the Special Committee on the Quality of Life was the first short story published by Harry Turtledove. It first appeared in the April 1987 issue of Asimov's and was reprinted, in a slightly altered form in Departures
The story is premised on the idea that Spain under the reign of King Ferdinand II and Isabella of Castille had in place a bureaucracy of government agencies comparable to those found throughout the world in the 20th century. The story itself is in the form of a mock "report" prepared by one such agency, the Special Committee on the Quality of Life, and its chairman, Jaime Nosénada. The report is an analysis of Christopher Columbus' proposed voyage across Atlantic Ocean as a means of reaching India. The report, enumerating the various risks such a voyage would pose to the sailors and country as a whole, recommends that the monarchs reject the proposal. Implicitly, Columbus never makes the voyage, with the consequences of that decision left to the readers' imagination.
The story's satire of unimaginative bureaucrats is pointed. The chairman's last name, Nosénada, may be read as the Spanish sentence "No sé nada", which translates into English as "I know nothing." Obviously, the chairman indeed knows nothing, allowing his terror of the unknown determine the course of his report; he deems the risk of the voyage to far outweigh any benefits.
Needless to say, Turtledove does not consider the potential good such bureaucracies can do, and so the story might be critiqued for its "one-sidedness". However, insofar as it takes aim at the negative aspects of government agencies, this five-page story succeeds quite well.
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