Arthur Dekker Savage 22 min read

On his last night in the city before his Social Adjustment appointment and his Departure Permit, a man frets that his forelock keeps bobbing.

Arthur Dekker Savage's 1953 story opens on the vain Allen Kinderwood in a regimented society of counsellors and permits, sketching a dystopia through small anxieties. Wry, unsettling social SF. Read it for a golden-age tale where petty grooming worries mask a chilling machinery of control.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban