Stephen Marlowe 20 min read

A fine, hard story of the inverted ethics of the post-war world, where inhumanity is the norm and cruelty pays dividends.

Stephen Marlowe's 1960 story opens on a marksman sighting down his rifle at dawn beside a bomb crater, sketching a grim dystopia where brutality is currency. Bleak, sharp social SF. Read it for a cold, hard-edged tale of a moral order turned utterly upside down.

In its time

Published in 1960, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Mel Varga