Franklin Gregory 27 min read

In a world groaning under ten billion people, a man muses that it will take a child to save it, since children caused the mess.

Franklin Gregory's 1960 story opens on Justin and his pregnant wife Doris debating overpopulation with rueful humor, the 'population-controllers' unheeded and the planet buckling under its own fertility. Wry, conversational social SF tackling one of the era's rising anxieties. Read it for thoughtful, human-scaled 1960s SF about the oldest problem of all: too many of us.

In its time

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

Reading it

27 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Leo Summers