Fritz Leiber 23 min read

In a weather-controlled future, the walking mills of Puffy Products creep across the Kansas wheat, until a marketing gimmick sends loaves floating into the sky.

Fritz Leiber's 1958 satire imagines centipede-legged automated bakeries and an advertising stunt that literally gets out of hand. Sharp, funny social SF skewering consumer culture and corporate cleverness. Read it for buoyant golden-age comedy from a master, with one gloriously absurd central image.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Wallace Wood