Mark Meadows 13 min read

Men or machines, something had to give. A maintenance man's deposition to a post-Calamity inquiry reveals that all the world's magazines secretly came from one cybernetic monopoly.

Mark Meadows's 1954 story spins a wry social-SF and space-opera tale of automation and catastrophe. Clever, ironic golden-age SF. Read it for a story that traces a world-shaking Calamity back to a hidden empire of publishing machines.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Dick Francis