Richard O. Lewis 15 min read

In a future of black-market sex-operas and three-hour trances, a husband plots his escape.

Richard O. Lewis's 1957 dystopia sits with Herbert Hyrel as he watches his wife vanish nightly into a stereoscopic 'telovis' headset, lost to the newer entertainments, and quietly hoards the free hours for a scheme of his own. A satire of a numbed, media-saturated society that reads sharper every decade, wrapped around a small domestic drama of quiet desperation. Read it for prescient 1950s social SF about screens, isolation, and the private lives they leave behind.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas