Varley Lang 23 min read

From dusty old books in a run-down library, a man has gotten the notion he's a one-man resistance movement, pitiful, foolish, and, he admits, hopelessly backward.

Varley Lang's 1955 story narrates a wistful dystopia from the margins, where a lone holdout resists a controlling regime that has taken over his remote sound. Melancholy, thoughtful social SF. Read it for a quietly affecting tale of stubborn, doomed individualism against a managed world.

In its time

Published in 1955, 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 Orban