Wyman Guin 1 hr 25 min read

In a future where every human body is legally shared by two alternating personalities, a forbidden love threatens the whole rigid order.

Wyman Guin's 1951 classic imagines a drug-regulated society of scheduled 'ego-shifts,' following schoolgirl Mary Walden into a system whose strangeness conceals real menace. A brilliant, disturbing, endlessly praised piece of social SF about identity and control. Read it for one of the genre's boldest thought-experiments, executed with chilling thoroughness.

In its time

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

Reading it

1 hr 25 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).

Illustrated by

David Stone