Stanley R. Lee 24 min read

In a domed city where the weather is manufactured, a preoccupied man has his pockets picked eleven times in one splendid morning.

Stanley Lee's 1960 story follows Humphrey Fownes, so lost in thought about the very idea of weather, an odd obsession for a man who lives under a climate-controlled dome, that he never notices the small army relieving him of his belongings. A light, clever piece of social SF built on a wry premise and a tidy sting. Read it for a charming magazine-era comedy about artificial worlds and the people too distracted to notice them.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Diane Dillon