Con Blomberg 12 min read

'Go fight City Hall' has become a battle cry, and New York's City Manager writes his fellow managers a sheepish memo begging for help with a situation that got badly out of hand.

Con Blomberg's 1957 story spins wry dystopian social-SF satire from municipal government in a strange future. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a droll tale, told as an interoffice memo, of civic ambition and consumer culture gone gloriously wrong.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Diane Dillon