Mack Reynolds 39 min read

The knock at the door came in the middle of the night, just as Josip Pekic had always, deep down, expected it would, even though the police state was supposedly a thing of the past.

Mack Reynolds's 1963 story opens on inherited dread in a reformed communist future, building a sharp social-SF satire of bureaucracy and economics. Incisive, ideas-driven golden-age SF. Read it for a clever tale about a timid man and a state that keeps insisting it has changed.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

39 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

George Schelling