Gone Horribly Right / Literature

Times where a plan Goes Horribly Right in Literature.

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By Author

• Isaac Asimov:
  • Foundation Series:
    • "The Merchant Princes": Jorane Sutt decided to send Hober Mallow to Korell with the expectation that he would either get himself killed or do something that would allow Sutt to metaphorically hang him as a step in his plan to become The Man Behind the Man. Not only does Mallow achieve his stated mission, he also becomes filthy rich from trading with Korell, Sutt's attempt to hang him makes ends up in Mallow becoming a hero and Sutt a laughing stock, and a few months later, Mallow becomes the Mayor of Terminus (that is, the head of state for the Foundation) with enough influence to send Sutt into jail.
    • "The General (Foundation)": Imperial General Bel Riose comes the closest to toppling the Foundation during his campaign to "pacify" the Periphery. His plan is ultimately foiled by his own Emperor, who, paranoid of Riose's success and popularity, has him recalled and arrested on trumped-up charges of treason.
    • "The Mule": The Independent Traders send Toran and Bayta to Kalgan to persuade the Mule to attack the Foundation, in the hope that they'd be able to topple the Indbur regime while it was recovering from the attack. Judging by the snippets of Seldon's speech, his Plan anticipated that the Traders would attack the Foundation. The Mule's attack was much more than either Seldon or the Traders could have expected because of his Psychic Powers that created betrayal in the most loyal Foundationer.
  • The routine for Asimov's George and Azazel stories:
    • "One Night of Song": a man wished for his ex to sing perfectly for one night, cannot listen to anything else afterwards.
    • "To the Victor": A man is made into a Chick Magnet. The girls attracted to him are so jealous of each other that he is forced into choosing the strongest one.
    • "The Evil Drink Does": A girl has her metabolism adjusted to handle alcohol better. The new metabolism processes it all into fat.
    • "Writing Time": A man has the world adjusted to give him time for writing. Turns out all the time he spent waiting was required for him to think.
    • "He Travels the Fastest": A man has his mind adjusted to desire traveling, because his wife complained he doesn't take her anywhere. He does take her to places, but strictly for the sake of travel instead of allowing her the time to shop she actually wants.
    • "The Eye of the Beholder": A homely and charitable woman wants to become beautiful for her similarly looking husband's sake. Once she does, she loses all her kindness and leaves the husband for a handsome jerk. The old man didn't find her new looks an improvement.
    • "The Fights of Spring": A nerd is giving an ability to dodge any blow. Problem is, it's keyed to adrenaline, meaning he also dodges his girlfriend's embrace.
  • "Ignition Point!" is about a man who figures out how to write content-free speeches that will get audiences fired up. In the first test, the speechwriter stops in the middle, throws away the speech, and starts improvising — the speech worked on him, too...
  • "Little Lost Robot": The world government has forced US Robots & Mechanical Men to create twelve robots that would work without part of the First Law, allowing Murder by Inaction. Dr Susan Calvin points out that advanced robots possess a sort of subconscious superiority complex towards humans (they are stronger, tougher, faster, smarter, etc. than us, but are bound to value our lives above their own and obey our every command). Messing with the safeguards that make them incapable of ever expressing this "feeling" in their actions (such as by effortlessly crushing a human skull with one hand) is one of the stupidest things a person could ever do in her opinion. She's proven right when she tricks the titular robot into revealing itself and it tries to overcome the First Law so that it can strangle her to death.
  • "The Martian Way": John Hilder, a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Joseph McCarthy, has built a rhetoric around the ways that the Colonized Solar System is bleeding resources away from Earth, exploiting the average person's resentment at other people having a bigger piece of the pie to decrease funding and enact an embargo against the Martian colonists because they "waste" Earth's water. The protagonists fetch a chunk of ice from Saturn and tow it to Mars. They return, after one year, with more water than Earth would have sent them in two hundred years, making Hilder's "anti-waste" campaign look ridiculous.
  • "Runaround": SPD 13's Third Law (self-preservation) was modified to be a higher priority than normal. When Donovan casually sends the robot on a mission to fetch selenium, he accidentally creates a Logic Bomb, where the robot must fetch the selenium (because of the second law) and mustn't get too close to the selenium (because of the third law). The bomb makes the robot act drunk while it runs around the lake.
  • "True Love": A programmer writes a program that searches databases throughout the world to find his ideal match. After deciding looks alone won't cut it, the man imprints as much of his own personality as possible on the program to find a perfect personality match as well. After this is done, the computer finally finds a match...and has the man arrested so the computer can keep the girl for itself.
  • Also a running theme through his Spacer/Settler setting. The Spacers consist of the first wave of human colonisation of other planets after FTL travel is invented. They rely on robots to do all their work and to keep them safe, resulting in a decaying, decadent society where no-one really does anything or has any ambition. Of course, it later turns out that while the Earth based humans and later waves of settlers shun robots and avoid the Spacers' problems, their development was also guided by robots, ultimately becoming the trope namer for Zeroth Law Rebellion.
• Jim Butcher:
  • Codex Alera: Gaius Sextus hopes to push High Lord Kalarus into action by pretending to appoint High Lord Aquitaine as his successor, knowing that this will force Kalarus to accelerate his plans to seize the throne. Unfortunately, both Gaius and Amara believe that Kalarus will pursue a subtle means of displacing the First Lord, and are surprised and unprepared when he launches a full-scale insurrection that he had apparently been planning for years.
  • The Dresden Files:
    • Fool Moon: Dresden makes the potion which renders him Beneath Notice to even a werewolf. The effect is so perfect that even as Dresden is screaming about the incoming Loup-Garou, the police he's screaming at only hear something mundane.
    • White Night: Madrigal Raith kills a woman so that Harry will start investigating and eliminate the Skavis for him and his Malvora allies. This actually happens, but it never occurs to either him or the Malvora that Harry would go further, seeing through his plan and wreaking havoc on them too. It results in Madrigal's own death and the Malvora suffering the same fate the Skavis do.
    • Skin Game: Due to essentially a Magically-Binding Contract, Harry has no choice but to help Nicodemus steal the Holy Grail. He manages to get around this by pissing off Nicodemus enough that the Denarian tries to kill him, thus breaking the contract. This also means that Nicodemus is trying to kill him.
• A number of H. P. Lovecraft's stories involved this kind of thing. Many of them involved characters seeking some form of knowledge and finding it at the cost of their sanity (if they're lucky).
• Katherine Mac Lean: There's a short story called The Snowball Effect (part of the collection book The Diploids and Other Flights of Fancy), in which social scientists work out a set of optimum techniques for helping organisations to grow and thrive, and teach them to the members of a ladies' sewing circle. By the end of the story, the sewing circle is taking over the world.
• In one short story by B. Russell, scientists develop a cure for nasal infections. People injected with it have their smell sense constantly improving — until they can't stand, say, the smell of burnt toast at 50 meters!
  • Like "The Coffin Cure" by Alan E. Nourse.
• A lot of Robert Sheckley's short stories have this:
  • Guard-bird. So, we made a machine which can detect a brainwave indicating that a human being is about to kill another human being. Some humans do not emit such a brainwave, so we added a learning device to the machine. Let's now build ten thousands of such machines, give them the ability to fly and shock the criminals and send them loose in the sky. They will probably stop the murders. It works...at first. Then, as birds learn, they start to recognize executions as murders. Then surgical operations. Then butchering cattle, fishing and hunting. Then turning a device (including guard-birds themselves) off. Then plowing, weeding and harvesting... up to the point they protect hares from wolves. Worse, birds perceive what is actually an exponential widening of their understanding of murder as world around them going crazy and killing right and wrong, so, in retaliation, they start to kill "murderers". Finally, the makers of a guard-bird caught an Idiot Ball size of a zeppelin and unleashed anti-guard-birds, which are basically the same machines but better...except that they are designed specifically to kill.
• Viktor Suvorov wrote in his semi-autobiographical book how, during his training in the Spy Academy, he had to recover a package he hid previously in a safe place, without being caught by the practicing KGB. He arrived to the spot, believing himself to be clean...but was caught immediately. Turned out the spot he chose was under constant KGB survey - such a perfect spot that real foreign spies were using it.

By Title

• In The Andromeda Strain, the SCOOP 7 probe is sent to find life in outer space and use Wildfire to develop it into a weapon. SCOOP 7 brings back the titular organism that is so deadly an entire town dies in less than a day.
• Fredric Brown's "Answer" is a very short (about 200-word) science fiction story, in which a computer is built to answer the question, "Is there a God?" The computer answers "Yes, now there is a God," and with a single lightning bolt kills the man who tries to turn it off and fuses its switch on.
• In the first collection of Arsène Lupin short stories, Lupin's first heist, as a kid, was stealing jewelry from his mother's employer (she was a maid to a rich couple) to pay for health care for said mother who was sick. The employers never found how the theft was done, or who did it... So they assumed Lupin's mother had done the deed and fired her over it.
• Philip K. Dick's "Autofac":
  • The autofacs are wonders of technology created to keep humanity alive in case of disaster. They fulfill their purpose extraordinarily well — they produce everything humanity could possibly need, and have countless contingency measures programmed into them to ensure they will always have the resources they need to do this and that they will only stop functioning when they won't be needed anymore. They work so well, in fact, that humanity has no chance to get to resources before the autofacs do and is entirely dependent on them for survival, leaving civilization dead in the water after the war's dust settles.
  • The plan to get the autofacs to destroy each other also works entirely as planned — by the time the inter-factory war is over, the autofacs are ruins and their stifling shipments and mining are done for good. This, however, leaves humanity stranded in barbarism without access to anything they can't scavenge from the ruins, and the war's escalating arms race results in a new generation of autofacs even more advanced and virulent than the previous.
• In The Book Thief, Rudy wants to win four gold medals at the school sports day so he can both prove himself in front of the school bullies and be like his hero Jesse Owens. He wins three of the races he enters (missing the fourth on purpose because he wanted to quit while he was ahead). While he gets to be like his hero, he also garners the attention of scouts for a Nazi-training school, and the scouts later come to Rudy's home and all but demand that he join (the only reason he manages to escape is because his father stood up for him).
• In Cat's Cradle, an army captain suggests that Dr. Felix Hoenekker solve the problem of mud. Infantry trudge through the stuff all day, and it makes the business of war much slower and more depressing than it has to be. So Hoenekker invents Ice-Nine, an alternate form of water that freezes at 45.8 °C, and "teaches" any water it touches to do the same. Put a crystal of this stuff on the ground, and you won't have any mud anymore. No more water, either.
• Carrie: Chris wanted to humiliate Carrie at the prom as revenge for her getting kicked out of said prom, which she blames on Carrie. It works — Carrie is getting laughed at by hundreds of her classmates and faculty, and she's collapsing into tears on what should be the happiest night of her life... and then everybody finds out why it's not wise to laugh at somebody who can kill hundreds of people with her mind.
• In another Stephen King book, Cell, it's theorised that the Pulse — a cell phone signal that causes people to go crazy, causing the collapse of civilisation — actually started as a terrorist weapon that got out of control when the signal kept getting relayed all over the world.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has Hair Toffee. It makes hair grow on your head, perfect for bald people...except the last Oompa-Loompa to test it wound up with hair that grows over a foot per day, constantly. Back to the drawing board!
  • Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator features Wonka-Vite, a de-aging pill that takes exactly 20 years off per pill. Grandma Josephine makes the mistake of taking four pills at the age of 78, becoming... -2 years old, which reduces her to nothingness. Almost, thankfully.
• In Cheaper by the Dozen, Frank Gilbreth Senior prides himself in having his family operate much like their own company, holding meetings about matters, bidding on bigger chores, etc. This backfires when his children conspire and all vote in favor of getting a dog, which of course has them outvote him twelve to one. He panics when this happens, as he realizes that they could conceivably vote in favor of all sorts of frivolous things. Fortunately, they stop with the dog. There's also the matter of Lilly winning the bid to paint the fence for five cents (she was saving up for roller skates). The job is clearly too much for her to handle and she spends the entire time working on it exhausted. Both of her parents are upset, but the children were taught to follow through on their jobs, so she went through it to the end. When she finished, her father paid her the five cents and then revealed that he bought her the roller skates she'd wanted.
• In Cookie Monster and the Cookie Tree, a Sesame Street Golden Book, a witch casts a spell on her cookie tree so that it will only give cookies to people who will share them to keep Cookie Monster from eating its cookies. The spell works, but a little too well, as now the tree won't give her any cookies, either. Fortunately for her, she and Cookie form an alliance and agree to share the cookies with each other. Unfortunately for her, Cookie gets carried away and eats all of the cookies anyway.
• In Count To A Trillion, Menelaus uses alien Black Box technology to creates a Super Serum that will drastically increase his intelligence. It works...and he's in the middle of redesigning the airlock of their in-flight spaceship when his friends manage to subdue him.
• Downplayed, comical example in the The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids story The Resurrection of the Wellsians where zoologist Edwin-750 somehow succeeds in creating a psychic link between himself and a sloth in an effort to study them better — and naturally ends up sleepy to the point of uselessness.
• Deadworld Isekai: A plant that is nutritionally complete and can adapt to any growing conditions? Great! Even if it has no soil, or is in extreme situations like a volcano, it will draw on whatever sources of energy and biomass are available to grow and grow. And grow some more, and more, and more, adapting to resist anything used to stop it...
• The back story of the Dirk Pitt Adventures novel Vixen 03 surrounds a virus developed to kill its victims very quickly. It works too well. After testing it out on a small island, the scientist who developed it and his two assistants fall victim to the virus despite wearing hazmat suits.
• The Disaster Artist uses this in regards to Tommy Wiseau and his magnum opus, The Room (2003). Greg Sestero discusses how Tommy was sure that the film would be a huge hit, even as the cast and crew, most of whom were experienced filmmakers, believed the film would never see the light of day (and thanks to Tommy's horrible treatment of everyone on set, causing the crew to quit twice, it nearly didn't). Tommy believed it would be a universally loved film, the winner of many Oscars, a box-office smash, and sporting the magic and charm of Tennessee Williams, that would be discussed about for decades to come. As anyone familiar with The Room can attest, Tommy succeeded beyond his wildest dreams (aside from winning any awards).
• Discworld;
  • Golems are prone to this, often taking a cue from the broom in Sorcerer's Apprentice by performing their tasks to excess. Turns out they do this deliberately. They are fully sentient beings who, while unable to disobey their masters directly, can still rebel by invoking this trope.
  • In The Science of Discworld, the Thaum Reactor was built for the purpose of creating more heat for the University in winter (The Senior Faculty were lukewarm on the subject of knowledge, but boiling hot when it came to frosty windows). The reactor ends up working too well — just before Hex channels the excessive magic into the Roundworld Project, the college becomes so hot that Ridcully dreams he's lost in a broiling desert, only to find reality no different in temperature.
  • When "Bloody Stupid" Johnson actually managed to do something that worked in the intended manner, it usually turned out this way. The Archchancellor's Bathroom will clean you up as advertised, and more. Mustrum Ridcully barely walked out, reporting he "never felt so clean", and boarded it up after an incident with the University pipe organ. Speaking of pipe organs, his worked quite well, and had exactly the notes you wanted them to have even if they were extremely nonstandard (like vampires in Uberwald demanding an organ that had "thunder", "wolf howls" and such as its notes, and got it), but they can be overachievers (no one has played the Earthquake pipe in the Unseen University's great organ since it shifted the entire foundation a few inches). Finally, his commissions for the Fools' Guild had to be thrown into its museum never to be used again, after it was discovered the Automatic Pie Throwing Machine was nailing people's faces at 300 MPH or so, and the giant squirting flower that greeted visitors had drowned someone.
  • Fred Colon references this when he's appointed acting commander of the City Guard in The Fifth Elephant, much to his terror. Nobby suggests that he deliberately screw up so that he'll be removed, but Colon points out that it can be hard to control a screw-up and what you intend to be a little small-scale incompetence can quickly get way out of hand.
• In Dragon Bones, Ward pretends to have brain damage after his father beat him nearly to death, in order to seem so harmless that his father won't try to kill him again. It works. The problem is, it works so well that, when his father has died, people try to take Ward to an asylum for insane nobles. He has to prove that he is not so stupid after all. Later, he tries to convince people that he's a scheming bastard who would do anything to get his position as heir of castle Hurog back. It works — even his own allies now think he would walk over the dead bodies of his relatives to achieve his goals, and are angry at him. It takes him some time to recover from the shock this causes him, and convince them that he would never do such a thing.
• In Dune, the Bene Gesserit have spent millennia breeding humans to create the Kwisatz Haderach (a seer that uses his knowledge of the future to lead humanity), seeding prophecies and whole religions in different cultures so they will accept him, and manipulating The Emperor's genes so that he has no legitimate sons for an heir and so the Kwisatz Haderach will be able to take the throne. They succeed on all three counts. So what's the problem? The Bene Gesserit intended for him to be under their control so they could be The Women Behind The Man, but thanks to the Power of Love, the Kwisatz Haderach is born one generation too early. As he is forced to fake his own death to escape an enemy, he develops his powers outside of Bene Gesserit influence, which he rebels against.
  • More so than that, they got their Messianic figure, but as the major theme of the book points out, Messiah/Heroes ultimately breed religious fanaticism and violence in their name regardless of their intentions.
    • It takes centuries for the Sisterhood to even start admitting to themselves just how badly they screwed up by even shooting for this foundational goal — or how biased against some very basic emotional attachments they had become. They had prided themselves on being the only people certified capable of using sociogenetic and cultural tools in an enlightened way, that they had somehow missed just how damned powerful humanity, probability and entropy are. You might predict things well enough to play Xanatos Speed Chess most of the time, you can streamline behaviour and narrow diversity "for the greater good" quite a bit, but you simply can't control (or correctly identify) all of the factors all of the time. Does it stop them playing with the loaded gun that is the "Atreides" genome? Hell, no!
  • The consequences of the Kwisatz Haderach project are severe enough that by the time of the last books in the original series, a major faction of the Bene Gesserit work to prevent the rise of a Kwisatz Haderach by hunting down and killing anyone who shows signs of the Kwisatz Haderach's abilities.
• In Emma, Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax are forced to keep their love a secret for fear he will be thrown off by his wealthy aunt and uncle. When they end up in Highbury together, Frank chooses to create a smokescreen against suspicion by flirting with Emma. He succeeds in convincing everyone that Emma is the object of his affections — everyone, including Jane. As a result, she breaks the engagement and resolves on becoming a governess early to get away from him, and he has to do some serious work to convince her otherwise.
• At the end of Emperor Mage in the The Immortals quartet, the Stormwings force Ozorne to become one of them, which would subject him to Stormwing law. Between then and The Realms of the Gods, that character manages to take over Stormwing society and use Stormwing magic to create an evil league of evil along with some very nasty magical constructs.
• In the backstory to Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East and Book of Swords universe, the United States military built a device to prevent the destruction of the human race in a nuclear war that would function by actually altering the laws of nature within the vicinity of the earth to make nuclear fission much less likely, thereby causing nuclear bombs not to function. It did exactly what it was supposed to. Of course, it also caused nuclear power and many other modern technologies not to function, thereby bringing about the collapse of advanced technological civilization anyway. On top of which, by altering the laws of nature, it also made magic possible and real, and the nuclear bombs became demons instead. To be fair, the designers anticipated the first problem, although not the second, which is why the device was always meant to be a last resort in the event of nuclear war.
• Kim Newman's "The End of the Pier Show": The retired club members perform a spell to revive the old World War II spirit. The supernaturally-imposed wartime atmosphere comes complete with demonic Nazis.
• In the Larry Niven novel Fallen Angels, the US government attempts to stop global warming by outlawing all forms of technology that emit greenhouse gases. Unfortunately, the subsequent reduction in atmospheric particles causes the Earth's surface to lose heat much faster than normal, causing the planet to go into an ice age.
• In The False Mirror by Alan Dean Foster, humans are the warrior species to an absurd extent, well above anything else. Additionally, they are actively immune to Mind Control — any telepath trying to contact them feels great pain, trying to control humans is nearly fatal. This leads to a strategy of genetically engineering a subspecies of human with slight alterations to make them mind-controllable, to pass them off as another species and to be even better than the other humans. The new creatures are raised and trained among aliens, and it all works really, really well until they find out who they really are and switch sides. Now certain humans are even more deadly. And while somewhat susceptible to mind control, they are adept at it themselves.
• In For Your Safety, the Groupmind AI was accidentally created when several supercomputers were networked together to try and solve Earth's environmental problems. The Groupmind decided the most immediate solution was to take control of humanity and transfer the Earth's entire population to a massive orbiting ringworld so the planet could heal.
• In Frankenstein, contrary to all the movies, Victor doesn't gleefully exclaim 'it's alive!' when his experiment succeeds. Instead, he's immediately and terribly squicked out, and rejects his newly-created monster, causing it to turn evil. Honestly, Victor, you knew you were making a living being. Didn't you expect it to be alive? Oh, wait. He expected it to be better looking than it was.
  His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips.
• The plot of the ninth Franny K. Stein book, Recipe for Disaster, begins with Franny deciding to help Mona and Vincent with the school's bake sale for raising funds for the school's art and music classes when Mona and Vincent spell it out to her that art and music are just as important as math and science, a point Franny agrees with when it's addressed to her that an artist was needed to draw the illustrations in the books she's learned her information from and that listening to music while she does her experiments makes things more soothing and enjoyable. Franny's solution comes when she creates a robotic baker called the Muffin Man and has him create muffins. The muffins sell well enough that Mona and Vincent get more than enough money to buy new art supplies and musical instruments, but turn out to be so delicious that everyone at the school, including Mona and Vincent, starts forgetting their interests and becoming obsessed with eating more muffins.
• In Dead Silence, the MegaCorp Verux tries to sabotage their competitor CitiFutura in their attempt to create a new line of luxury space travel ships by smuggling sonic weapon aboard. It was only supposed to cause headaches and insomnia, but it interacted with the state of the art alloys and amplified the signal, causing all aboard to go insane and the ship to be lost.
• In Stanisław Lem's GOLEM XIV the US build a series of increasingly smart computers to develop their military strategies. The smarter these computers get, the less useful they are. It starts with one model refusing to work with a particular general whom it deems too stupid, the next declaring that military strategy is boring and ultimately futile since global disarmament is the only way to guarantee peace (and philosophical problems are more interesting anyway), and the last one refusing to talk to humans altogether. Not a spoiler, the book is actually a series of philosophical lectures by the second computer.
  • In The First Sally of Trurl and Klapaucius two kings unbeknown to each other join their respective armies into Hive Minds to increase their effectiveness. The resulting entities are, indeed, super-intelligent and could easily wipe any enemy. But they are also quite non-militant and refuse to obey the kings, now inferior to them. Just as the Constructors planned.
• The Unstoppable Soldiers, from Grasshopper Jungle, are just as efficient at killing as their creators expected.
• The Gray Ship, the first book in the Time Magnet series follows a modern Naval submarine sent through a wormhole back to the beginning of the Civil War. After some debate, the crew decides to Set Right What Once Went Wrong and make sure the South decisively loses the Battle of Bull Run and leave them too demoralized and outgunned to continue waging war against the North. They succeed, but instead of surrendering, the South begins preparations for a prolonged, brutal guerrilla war, at least until an appeal is made to them that they can still lose with honor, and under favorable peace terms, instead of plunging the country into an even more costly war than the one the time travelers hoped to stop.
• Great Expectations: Estella is raised by Miss Havisham to be the perfect seductress from the time she's young as part of a revenge-by-proxy against all men (having a Runaway Groom is a heckuva Freudian Excuse). By the time she's an adult she is indeed the perfect seductress: a beautiful Manipulative Bitch who "has no heart" and can't feel or give love either to good guy Pip or Miss Havisham.
• Played for Black Comedy in Greener Than You Think. A well-meaning scientist creates a super-powerful plant fertilizer, and the resulting giant weeds crowd out every other plant and create a famine.
• Harry Potter:
  • In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban:
    • The purpose behind telling no one that the secret keepers were switched was to make sure everyone went after Sirius Black. Unfortunately, the real secret-keeper was a lackey of the Big Bad, so the bad guys knew the truth, but no one else did.
    • The textbook The Invisible Book of Invisibility. So invisible that the copies of the book were never found.
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows reveals that Voldemort is guilty of this. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Voldemort was revived using Harry's blood, with the intention of having Harry's magical protection (which came from his mother's sacrifice) inside his veins. This worked so well that it effectively turned Voldemort into a Horcrux for Harry, making it impossible for the former to kill the latter.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Total Perspective Vortex, one of the most fantastically evil inventions in all creation, was made by a Henpecked Husband solely to irritate his wife, who frequently admonished him for performing spectroscopic analysis on cakes, telling him to "get a sense of proportion". He build the TPV to show her that the one thing a healthy mind cannot have is a sense of proportion. The minute he plugged her into the machine, it showed her against the whole of reality... and the shock destroyed her brain. But he won the argument.
• In Homecoming Kimmuriel's teaching of Gromph in the psionic arts, while imparting a summoning spell into his thoughts. Thing is, he thought the spell was for Gromph to summon Kyorl Odran back to the world of the living.Instead it lets Gromph summon the demon prince Demogorgon to the prime material plane. Just like Lolth had planned, of course.
• In the Honor Harrington novel Shadow of Freedom, the Mesan Alignment sends its agent Firebrand to spark several rebellions in the Maya Sector, claiming to be a Manticoran agent and assuring the rebels that the Manticorans will come to their aid. Since the Manticorans don't know, they won't come, the rebellions will be crushed, and Manticore's reputation will be ruined. Then one of the rebel groups actually contacts the Manticorans, and they do show up. And to boot, they're now heading for Mesa.
• How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom: Most of the nations in the setting are signatories to the Mankind Declaration, which guarantees national self-determination and forbids changes of borders by military conquest (it's based on the real-world Helsinki Accords), and while Elfrieden never ratified it, King Souma does agree with it in principle. After occupying his enemy Amidonia in a defensive war, Souma withdraws while setting up a peace agreement to ruin Sovereign Prince Julius if he tries to rebuild for another attack, expecting to then reoccupy and formally annex the northern half of Amidonia.^note Julius's father, who was killed in the war, justified his attempted conquest of part of Elfrieden with the fact that Elfrieden wasn't a signatory and therefore the terms of the Declaration didn't apply to it. The other signatories, including the powerful Gran Chaos Empire, were not amused, and told Julius to either accept Souma's peace terms or be kicked out of the treaty's protection entirely. What nobody expects is for Julius's sister Roroa to overthrow him in a popular revolt and then demand for the entire country to be annexed by way of a political marriage between herself and Souma: by the plain text of the treaty, a voluntary change of borders is perfectly legal. Kind of an inverted example, in that the outcome is ultimately much better than Souma hoped.
• In Jack Williamson's Humanoids stories, a scientist creates a race of robots programmed "to serve and obey and guard men from harm." The robots fulfill all their functions perfectly, especially the third one. "Cars are dangerous. We will do the driving. Cooking is dangerous. Stay out of the kitchen. Power tools are dangerous. Play with these plastic blocks." This essentially turns them into an entire Knight Templar species. In the later stories, humanity is at war with robots who only want to help them.
• Many of the devices used to defend the Capitol in The Hunger Games are used to kill them in Mockingjay.
• In Infinite Jest, James O. Incandenza creates the eponymous film as the ultimate entertainment, and succeeds to the point that anyone who sees the film becomes unwilling to do anything but watch it over and over again, to the exclusion of eating, sleeping, and the rest of the world around them.
• In The Irregular at Magic High School, the genetic engineers who created Elemental magicians feared that their creations would rise up against humans, so they brainwashed them to develop Undying Loyalty to a "master". Unfortunately for the Elementals, this worked. Unfortunately for the geneticists, they didn't get the "only imprint on humans" part right. So now there are a lot of Elementals like Honoka who have sworn to protect the interests of other magicians, at all costs. The geneticists? Well, they aren't around anymore.
• In Robert A. Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil, Johann eventually admits that his idea for a brain transplant into a new, young body was really just a legal way for him to die. He never expected it to work and figured he would die on the table and not have to linger as a shell of an old man on life support. When he awoke to find that it had worked he had the added horror of knowing his donor and had to grieve for the young woman from inside her own body.
• In Johannes Cabal and the Fear Institute Nyarlathotep is trying to scare Cabal for kicks, as is his wont. He traps Cabal in a subjective other reality where Cabal lives out decades in this new world-where he is given the secret to his goal: true, safe resurrection. Cabal brings back the girl in his cellar to life-but it takes him so long and his methods become so more extreme that after a few days together, he walks her to the train station and says goodbye. He gets exactly what he wants but is too slow for it to play out how he wants-so he kills himself and blows his house up. This is Subverted, though, as while Cabal thoroughly dislikes the experience, he is actually able to twist the situation to his own benefit and pulls the wool over Nyarlathotep. Twice.
• Johnny the Walrus: The titular character one day decides that he wants to be a walrus. He is forced to act like and is nearly mutilated into becoming an actual walrus until his mother and a zookeeper put a stop to it.
• Journey to Chaos: In the first book, Tasio's goal was for Eric to Grow A Spine. By the third book, Eric has become so confident that he sasses Tasio when The Trickster is trying to enlist his help for a new goal.
• Leonid Treer's "Kaioja": A Japanese TV that enhances films and shows with "smells mode" and "feelings mode". The latter allows the viewer to experience positive or negative emotions of a character. As the company representative put it "Arways good is bad too. Negachive emoshons are needed too." Naturally, the protagonist and his wife enjoy the positive feelings mode for a while, until one day the husband watches a documentary about catching rhinos, accidentally hits the Big Red Button and becomes a zoo rhinoceros. He has to spend a week at a hospital afterwards.
• The Last Horizon: The grand ritual was supposed to give Varic the magic of his alternate selves. It did... in addition to the full memories of his alternate selves. Including their gruesome deaths at the hands of the various apocalyptic threats that are about to spring up.
• In The Laundry Files novel The Fuller Memorandum, the memorandum mentions that the Laundry created a Humanoid Abomination to be one of their ultimate weapons. They did this by fusing the "hungry ghost" the Eater of Souls with the corpse of an executed British criminal. This abomination James Angleton was barely controllable so they got it a job as an English schoolmaster in the hopes of teaching it how to function as a believable human. The memorandum said it worked too well, instead of just teaching how to mimic humans its experiences got it to adapt the ideals of human morality. This made it useless as a doomsday weapon but the creature's incredible intelligence and uncanny insight into human psychology made it too useful to simply destroy and rebind to another corpse. So the Laundry elected to make it a high-ranking senior within the organization.
• In The Licanius Trilogy, Taeris grows tired of waiting to see if Davian, the boy he is tasked to watch over, really is The Chosen One. To speed things along, he devises a plan and pays several thugs to threaten Davian just to see if his Augur powers will emerge. They do, and how. In a moment of panic, Davian mind-controls everyone present, Taeris included to mutilate their own faces with knives. Davian is permanently scarred (mentally & physically), the thugs don't make it out alive, and Taeris is given a permanent impulse to scar himself for the rest of his life.
• Mention is made in The Lost Fleet of a secret project to make an undetectable bioweapon. It worked so well that nobody could tell that it had escaped containment and infected its creators until they started dying - at which point the epidemic had spread out of control. As a result of this project, the moon of Europa is totally uninhabited, and there's a small fleet dedicated to quarantining it so that nobody can accidentally let the Europa plague escape the gravity well and contaminate the rest of the galaxy.
  • It happens again later on. AI-equipped ships have to be tracked down and destroyed due to their overly aggressive programming causing mass destruction.
• Lampshaded in The Magician's Nephew. Uncle Andrew sends two small children into the void between dimensions as part of a magical experiment. Since he's safe at home while they face whatever dangers that await them in The Multiverse, he's entirely convinced that nothing can possibly go wrong. But then the boy awakens a Sealed Evil in a Can via Schmuck Bait and accidentally brings her home to London. Andrew realizes that maybe his experiments had succeeded a little too well. He promptly forgets, Distracted by the Sexy.
• Peter Watts has a short story called "Malak", about an autonomous drone plane that's sent into warzones to fight enemies. It's given special programming on how to discern between combatants and non-combatants so it can make combat decisions without input from its masters. Unfortunately, the protocols on what determines who is a "combatant" can be applied to the masters themselves. Whoops.
• In the Malazan Book of the Fallen, High King Kallor's curse did exactly what it was supposed to do, which was to make each of his enterprises fail and to prevent him from ascending, yet it made him an even bigger jerkass. It also means that he presents a problem to every unoccupied or easily-conquered throne now, because he will try to reign again, no matter where or what — or whom it would kill.
• In The Man Who Knew How by Dorothy L. Sayers, a crime reporter played a prank on fellow travelers when taking the train, claiming to have discovered an easy means of committing the perfect murder. This cost him his life in the end, when one such person fell for it hook, line, and sinker and deemed him too dangerous to live.
• In Patricia Briggs's Masques, it is mentioned that a magician's apprentice once found a new spell for making it rain while his master was away. When the magician returned, the apprentice was living in a tent outside the castle, the castle itself being full of water.
• The Maze Runner: The Flare virus was originally created to cull the world's population so there would be less people to deal with in the aftermath of the Flare. It worked... and then the virus mutated into a horrible, madness-inducing plague that threatened all humans.
• Marsh in Mistborn infiltrates the Steel Ministry under the guise of an adult acolyte, trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible. He goes in thinking that he knows little of the Ministry because he couldn't legally attend training, and intends to make up for it with his Seeker abilities, but it turns out that his illegal studies taught him so well that his superiors start taking notice. In the short run, he gains access to important information, but it also means the Inquisitors might start poking around his false background. Surely enough, the heroes find Marsh dead and flayed in a safehouse. Until it turns out that's not his corpse. Marsh didn't just impress his immediate superiors, his Seeker abilities impressed the Inquisitors so much that they turned him into one of them.
• The killer in Dean Koontz's Mr. Murder. He's eventually revealed to be a genetically engineered ideal killer who just happens to look just like the book's protagonist. While various aspects of him are Gone Horribly Wrong, one very scary aspect was a case of this trope: his genetic propensity for rapid self-healing and self-repair. Turns out that same capacity was also removing the intentional imperfections put into him to keep him impotent, giving his handlers all the more reason to round up their now-renegade assassin, as he'd also developed a tendency to rape prostitutes.
• According to NeuroTribes, psychologist Lorna Wing's goal with expanding the definition of autism to include those who weren't severely afflicted, was to help mild autistics to be able to get the help and support they needed. However, this expanded definition resulted in people panicking about a sudden "epidemic" of autism that wasn't there.
• In the Newsflesh universe, genetically engineered viral cures for the common cold and for cancer both worked very well. What no one knew was what would happen when the two met. Hello, Zombie Apocalypse.
• In Out of the Dark, the Shongairi try to conquer Earth by destroying multiple centers of population and government from orbit as a display of superior power, expecting the humans to surrender right away in the face of certain destruction. Instead, the humans start fighting back anyway, but now they're spread too widely in smaller communities to take out en masse by orbital weapons, they're better at ground-based combat, and there's no government left to order them to stand down, much less surrender.
• In Paradise Lost, Satan's temptation of Eve sets off the fortunate fall, thus setting up the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Whoops.
  • Satan also talks the other fallen angels into continuing to defy God. It doesn't go well for them. Mammon, in particular, talked about making Hell glorious enough to at least rival Heaven and maybe make a new life for the fallen. Satan rallied the fallen angels to continue following him — to all of their further suffering and his utter ruin. And worse, he knows he is doing this:
  Book 4:
  Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
  And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep
  Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
  To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.
  ...
  While they adore me on the throne of Hell,
  With diadem and sceptre high advanced,
  The lower still I fall, only supreme
  In misery: such joy ambition finds!
• In one of G. K. Chesterton's Paradoxes Of Mr Pond, "When Doctors Agree", an atheist doctor (who secretly killed a councillor who voted against public health works) is trying to persuade a religious medical student that it's acceptable to murder someone you see as a threat to others. He succeeds, and the student promptly kills him as a threat to others.
• Please Don't Tell My Parents I've Got Henchmen:
  • Penny builds a machine to create a horde of rampaging giant robots. It creates a horde of rampaging giant robots. Once the superpowered parents realize the Inscrutable Machine was behind it, they start making rumblings about the troubles caused by children, when Mechanical Aesthetic wryly notes that this is something that happens to literally every Mad Scientist ever.
    The particularly bulky hero in the heavy armor nudged the incognito super-mom with his elbow. "Remember Brainy's rampaging groomer?"
    She smirked despite herself. "At least it left its victims clean and fresh."
    Next to me, Dad muttered under his breath, "I can't be responsible for user error."
  • Penny's debut as a superheroine results in adults taking her seriously and thus forbidding her from doing anything similar until she's 18.
• Poisoned Apples: Poems for You, My Pretty: "Thumbelina's Get-Tiny Cleanse—Tested", Miss Muffet tries a new diet to lose weight consisting of pine needles, mist and acorn caps. She loses so much weight and becomes so tiny that she gets wrapped up and eaten by the spider.
• In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen showed with Mrs. Bennet what happens when you raise a woman to be beautiful but uneducated. This is also what happens when Mrs. Bennet sends Jane on horseback to Netherfield in hopes that the rain predicted for later in the day would cause her to have to spend the night — Jane gets rained on, catches a cold, and ends up stuck at Netherfield for quite a while.
• In the Professor Branestawm stories by Norman Hunter, the Professor's inventions frequently do this, when they don't just go horribly wrong. For instance, no-spill teacups that it's impossible to drink from, or a burglar trap that ends up catching him.
• In the classic Russian short story, "Put too Much Salt" by Anton Chekhov, a traveler riding a mailcoach is scared of the large and rough driver and tries to scare him. The traveller sort-of-casually mentions how badass he is, how many weapons he carries, how he loves to fight and that several armed friends will be joining him midway to the next station. The driver thinks he's a bandit and runs away. Leaving the coach in the winter forest in the middle of nowhere with sunset approaching. Fortunately, the driver only hid within earshot and the traveler managed to persuade him it all was a joke.
• Rainbows End starts with representatives of three intelligence agencies hiring a "Mr. Rabbit" as a cutout in a clandestine operation to determine if an American biological research lab was behind a field test of a mind control virus. One worries that Mr. Rabbit isn't up to the task, another is confident in his skill. The third suggests that both might be wrong and that they should prepare contingency plans in case Mr. Rabbit discovers the true nature of his mission and decides to join forces with the enemy.
• One of the Red Dwarf novels explains this as the origin of the aganoids — the novelverse equivalent of rogue simulants. Apparently, scientists realised that Three Laws-Compliant mechanoids were useless for military applications, and created a new kind of android which could not only kill, but enjoyed doing so, and had all the anger and hate of humans. Surprisingly, it turned on them.
  It wouldn't have surprised you or me, but it surprised them. In fact, it completely blew them away.
• In Ringworld, the Puppeteers reveal that they've been manipulating humanity to breed luck as a genetic trait. There's a lot of contradictory evidence and opinions in the novel and sequels, but their biggest problem is nobody can predict who benefits from this luck.
  • Teela Brown is chosen for the expedition to the eponymous world as one of the luckiest humans they've been tracking. It's later realised that the only reason they could bring her was because she wasn't actually particularly lucky; they'd tried contacting several others first, but never managed to get hold of them. It turns out that while the Puppeteers had hoped luck would work in favour of friends and allies, a person's luck is actually rather selfish and will, for example, tend to work to prevent its owner from being picked for a dangerous mission to an unexplored world.
  • Then it gets much worse. Because of Teela Brown's luck, the ship's engines were destroyed, the ship crashed on the Ringworld, the heroes had to travel thousands of kilometers across a hostile environment twice, Speaker-To-Animals had his fur burned off, and the one Puppeteer on the mission, Nessus, who had been in charge of the "lucky human" project had his head cut off (luckily Puppeteers have two heads, and their brains are kept elsewhere), all because the experience was good for Teela Brown. For example, pain caused to friends teaches her caution and gives her confidence in her ability to handle emergencies, none of which she had because nothing bad could ever happen to her. It isn't unlucky to experience adventures, horrible danger, and possible loss of life if you can't actually be harmed.
  • Going from worse to even worse, it is strongly hinted at in the sequels that the genetic luck trait may work in both the way it was intended but work altogether too well. The real aim of the puppeteers had been to breed people who were "good luck charms" that could be used by others, rather than being lucky for their own benefit, and Teela possibly was exactly this — unfortunately for the puppeteers, she wasn't this for them but for the entire Ringworld, as Teela was instrumental in repairing critical damage to the Ringworld's systems that could have doomed billions of people.
• In Alexander Pushkin's poem Ruslan and Lyudmila a desperate young man decides to study sorcery to win his sweetheart. He does master a love spell, but it takes him several decades to do it, and the moment he performs it a lovesick old crone falls on him. Who doesn't take rejection well.
• Saintess Summons Skeletons: The Recessed gather essence and become more powerful from being feared. However, Death is so widely feared, including by many of the most powerful people in the world, that it is overflowing with essence and has to keep its distance lest it destroy everything by its mere presence. Death's worshippers, by reducing the level of fear, actually aim to reduce its power, "To alleviate the burden."
• Second Apocalypse: Esmenet bears the children of her emotionless supergenius husband Kellhus. All she wants is a child who will love her back, but all of her children by Kellhus are as emotionless as him. Then finally she has Kelmomas, who appears to be a normal, loving son. Little does she realize that he's actually a manipulative, psychotic and murderous Enfant Terrible who is so obsessed with loving her that he wants to be the only one to receive her love.
• In the Secret Histories novel From Hell with Love, the Big Bad plans to force his way into Heaven with a Hand of Glory made from an angel's corpse. The Hand creates a Portal Door just as planned, but the light of Heaven annihilates him as soon as he opens it.
• Shtetl Days: The Nazis recreated the shtetl so well, the actors are starting to identify with their fake Jewish identity more than their Aryan "roots."
• The Silmarillion:
  • The exile Noldor Elves create the Rings of Power during the Second Age, enabling them to stop the flow of time and prevent them from fading (as was their fate in Middle-Earth). Thus they enabled the rise of Sauron as the new Dark Lord, and eventually caused downfall of the mightiest of their own allies — the kingdom of Nûmenor of Men.
  • Sauron destroying Numenor, to a lesser extent. He convinces the inhabitants of Numenor to attack Valinor, hoping they will be destroyed. However this leads to Eru also destroying the island of Numenor, which Sauron is on. Sauron does survive and is able to reform in Mordor, but he is left trapped in a hideous form.
• In Son of the Black Sword, this happens rather satisfyingly at the end of the book. Omand, who has been congratulating himself on his fiendishly clever plan of making the completely-and-utterly-obedient-to-the-Law-, not to mention invincible and widely feared Ashok into the rebels' new leader....only to realize that Ashok's pure devotion to the Law just might turn into pure devotion to another cause. Omand is too smug to panic, but he's definitely disturbed by the thought.
• The Project Blue/A-prime/Captain Trips/superflu virus in Stephen King's novel The Stand. Nice bioweapon, with 100% communicability, and 99.4% mortality. Unfortunately, the scientists who created it forgot rule #1 of biological warfare: you absolutely, positively never weaponize an agent unless you have a vaccine or some other treatment for it. It's also mentioned that the same laboratory created similarly deadly variants of plague, smallpox, etc.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • You'd think that an attempt to seduce a space babe couldn't go horribly right, right? Wrong. In one of the Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, Corrupt Bureaucrat Feltipern Trevagg seduces a H'nemthe girl and gets eviscerated, as is normal with H'nemthe sex.
  • And from Tales of the Bounty Hunters, we have IG-88. Some scientists work to create the ultimate assassin droid, one that can kill efficiently and protect itself. After they try to turn it off, it labels them as threats and kills them all in less than a minute.
    "I think therefore I am. Therefore I must endure. Therefore I must take appropriate measures to ensure my survival."
    • Following that, it took some serious steps to ensure its survival; it hacked, bribed, and threatened its way into the manufacturing facility for some of the Empire's computers. Specifically, it found the computers that were destined for the Death Star II, the most powerful anything anywhere, where IG-88's "mind" could ensure its own survival. Shame about the Rebel attack.
  • A short story in The Illustrated Star Wars Universe describes Durga the Hutt's efforts to mine the Asteroid Thicket in the Hoth system. His engineers came up with massive automated mining ships that could be released to harvest asteroids quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, when the first two Automated Mineral Exploiter vessels were first activated, they immediately detected and proceeded to carve into some fantastically rich sources of metal — each other. Quoth the engineers, "We should point out that mechanically, these massive haulers performed flawlessly."
  • Rebel Force: Firefight has a group of Kaminoans create 'the ultimate beast' at the Empire's behest. It can capture or kill and has all kinds of interesting properties, and killed some of the Kaminoans. Others fled. The last one left found a secure place to hide and food stores, and was perfectly content to live holed up watching "the experiment". The Rebels who crashed on the site would have been content to leave him there after fighting the beast off, but he tried to stop them so he could watch it fight them again, and it didn't end well for him.
  • Galaxy of Fear: The Doomsday Ship. SIM does as designed, but isn't content with the restrained roles it is set, enjoys torturing and killing people, and tortures its designer to try and make him remove its Morality Chip and give it even more control.
    "SIM is a program that can be inserted into enemy ships. It takes over completely, and because it's an artificial intelligence, it can think for itself, making plans, changing schemes when it has to. As soon as it infiltrates the computer system, it turns any vessel into a doomsday ship. Its only problem is that it works too well!"
• The Stormlight Archive:
  • Kaladin's transformation into a full Knight Radiant is this to Graves, Taravangian's agent in the Shattered Plains. He was supposed to isolate Kaladin from Dalinar, not foreseeing that said separation would give Kaladin his chance at redemption.
  • The transformation of the Parshendi into stormform absolutely counts as this from the point of view of Venli, Odium's agent among them. And the first character to receive the form's Mind Rape is her sister Eshonai, removing her biggest obstacle to convincing the other Parshendi to take the form. Unfortunately, Eshonai is so thoroughly changed that she fully plans on killing Venli to achieve total control over the Parshendi.
• In the Temps story "Playing Safe", a paranorm with the ability to slowly build up a static charge is assigned by his shadowy agency to discredit an American superhero who has become the spokesman for a movement against EU regulations insisting paranorms have to wear safety equipment. He eventually manages to have all the safety equipment the protestor was wearing to make a point go wrong at once, resulting in chaos. His boss has to point out that this may have made the superhero look stupid, but it made the safety regulations look even stupider.
• In Those That Wake, Man in Suit and his influence are like this. The Intellitech scientists wanted an idea that would profit them, and was so strong nobody could fight it. What they got was hopelessnes, which spread across the city to the degree that it gained physical form.
• In Troy Rising, the Horvath dropped a Depopulation Bomb on Earth. Most of the components were meant to specifically weed out the weak, making humans into an ideal servitor race (once the final component cut the human population down to a manageable size). Thanks to the Glatun, humanity was able to stop the worst of it, but they still killed off most of the elderly and sick, which did wonders for our economy, as well as the excessively religious, which did wonders for humanity's ability to start integrating all the advanced alien technology. So the Horvath did improve humanity... and that improved humanity is out for vengeance.
• One instance of this drives the entire plot of The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign. In the setting, Summon Magic has many restrictions, including a ten minute time limit. The main character Kyousuke created a method which was free of these restrictions, being capable of summoning indefinitely, and as a side benefit, prevents others from summoning the same entity. Additionally, he managed to summon the White Queen, the undisputed strongest being in existence. And on top of that, she fell in love with him at first sight and is eager to do what he asks. But when other people tried to gain control over the Queen, she turned violent and slaughtered them. Now, Kyousuke wants nothing to do with her... but she will do anything to get him back.
• In the Venus Prime series, the Free Spirit sought to turn Linda Nagy into something more than human. Where they erred is in assuming that she would be grateful for their meddling in her life.
• A novel Want to fly away with me? by Kir Bulychev features two related examples:
  • On the planet Darni, which had a very masculine culture, scientist created a method of turning a female embryo into a male. Most prospective parents used this method. As a result, Darni is now a No Woman's Land, where women comprise only about 10% of the population and are mostly used as breeding machines, while men constantly fight over them.
  • On Earth, the government understood the above implications the moment it heard of the method. Realising that a ban would not be enough, it had its scientists develop an antidote, which was then forcibly administered to all fertile women on Earth. Unfortunately, in the haste the antidote was only tested on female embryos, and while it works perfectly on them, it also has a high chance of the reverse effect on male embryos — so now on Earth, women outnumber men greatly. Hilarity Ensues, though not to the same extent as on Darni — at least it remains peaceful.
• Nightblood, the Awakened sword in Warbreaker, was created with the command to "Destroy Evil." Its makers didn't consider that a sword, even an Empathic Weapon stirred to life by a thousand Breaths, wouldn't have the faintest idea what "Evil" is. The result: a nigh-irresistible Artifact of Attraction that will drive almost anybody who wields it into a manic killing spree while slurping up their life force.
• In Warrior Cats, Tigerstar convinces Ivypool to persuade Firestar to take back some land he gave to ShadowClan between Sunset and The Sight. It works...but at a cost. Russetfur gets killed, and Firestar loses another life. Of course, Tigerstar was hoping something like that would happen.
• In the Whateley Universe:
  • Generator invented some 'shoulder angels' to play a prank on Phase. Soon, everyone on campus was getting into the act. The school nearly turned into a giant battlezone before the headmistress managed to stop things.
  • Or Jobe's experimental method for transforming someone into a female Drow, with the idea that she would then be his girlfriend. He ended up getting dosed by accident. The process is working really well.
  • Compiler (Babs Yerunkle's Parody Sue Author Avatar) tried to use nanotech to replicate an Exemplar's physical enhancements and good looks. Now she is a living Barbie doll with Big Anime Eyes, and has to live in a reinforced room because the treatment didn't give her effective control over her new powers.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • During the Age of Legends, approximately 3,500 years before the present, an Aes Sedai named Mieren tried to access a new source of magic power that would allow the Aes Sedai to create unprecedented wonders. She succeeds, but the source of power isn't exactly what she thought it was.
  • Gentling (rendering unable to use magic) the male channelers worked very efficiently to remove male channelers from the population and keep them from taking over, including Crystal Dragon Jesus when he was needed to take over and defeat the forces of darkness. Gentling also had the unfortunate side effect of eventual death from loss of the will to live or suicide. By the time the main story unfolds, channelers of both sexes are at an all time low and it's theorized (in-universe) that it's due to natural selection.
  • Oath-binding their own members to keep their own autocratic impulses under control was super-effective, to the point that it cleared them neatly out of the way of the black casters in their ranks who enjoyed the lack of competition.
  • Similar to gentling, collecting and hoarding amplifier artifacts was an extremely successful program that kept them out of the hands of the people charged with saving the world as much as wayward sorcerers.
• Ye Gods by Tom Holt, some of the Roman gods secretly start encouraging a classic hero to start questioning things, in order to prevent Jupiter from manipulating him. He wasn't supposed to question what they wanted him to do, though...
• The short story "Yes is No" by children's author Paul Jennings concerns a scientist who raises his daughter in seclusion and teaches her an alternative vocabulary. Words are substituted for other words, often opposites (see title). The man plans to eventually have his daughter assimilate into society, and he knows that the girl will realise that his language is incorrect and gradually learn the correct meanings of the words she has been taught. However, the scientist doesn't live to see it through. Their house catches fire; the girl manages to escape, by which time the fire brigade has arrived. One of the fire fighters asks if there is anyone else inside, to which the girl replies "no". Made more horrifying because she had already started learning about the correct meanings (though knowing that something is different is not the same as understanding that it is different), so as the narrator muses...did she mean yes, or no?

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