Fritz Leiber 23 min read

In a bombed, brutalized post-war America of masked women and hook-fendered cars, a visiting Englishman glimpses a society sliding into cruelty.

Fritz Leiber's 1950 classic is a savage, prescient dystopia of gender, violence, and cultural rot, following a horrified outsider through a New York gone wrong. One of the most admired stories of its era, sharp and disturbing. Read it for a landmark of dystopian SF that saw the ugliness in the American future with terrible clarity.

In its time

Published in 1950, 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

Paul Calle