Aldo Giunta 57 min read

Small, seedy Charlie Jingle sits lost in a big man's high-backed chair before a row of long Commissioners' faces, and cheerfully waves off their bunko to get down to cases.

Aldo Giunta's 1957 story spins a wry dystopian social-SF tale from one little man's defiance of the powers that be. Sharp, offbeat golden-age SF. Read it for a story where an unimpressed nobody faces down a solemn tribunal and refuses to play along.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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