Fritz Leiber 43 min read

In a post-atomic America ruled by showmen-scientists, a girl sleeps off a drunk beside the martyrs' plaque and the ruins of Manhattan's Inferno.

Fritz Leiber's 1951 story surveys a morally hollowed world where science has become spectacle and sham, asking whether a lack of values is itself a value. Sardonic, richly imagined social SF from a genre great at the top of his game. Read it for biting, atmospheric golden-age SF about a civilization that has lost its moral compass.

In its time

Published in 1951, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller