Mack Reynolds 22 min read

Generations after the war, a young man teaches clan children the myth-legend of a lost world where men bore weapons and women kept the home.

Mack Reynolds's 1956 story sits in an aspen grove with Alan and the bored, unbelieving girls of the Wolf clan, in a post-catastrophe society whose gender order has been utterly inverted. Thoughtful social SF that uses the far future to interrogate the assumptions of its own decade. Read it for provocative golden-age SF about how thoroughly the world after the bombs might rearrange us.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller