Kurt Vonnegut 14 min read

In a deathless America, every birth requires a volunteer to die, and one expectant father is having triplets.

Vonnegut's mordant little fable imagines a United States with no war, no disease, no aging, its population frozen at forty million by a simple rule: to make room for a new life, someone must call the Federal Bureau of Termination and check out. Edward Wehling waits in a maternity ward being redecorated as a memorial, doing the terrible arithmetic. Bleakly funny, humane, and razor-efficient, it's Vonnegut in miniature. Read it for one of the sharpest dystopian shorts ever written, and a title you'll never quite shake.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

14 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).