Ivar Jorgensen 17 min read

Late at night, the weary President sets down his western anthology to receive his trusted Press Secretary, snatching rare moments of reading between his efforts to stem the world's dash to ruin.

Ivar Jorgensen's 1956 story builds a tense dystopian social-SF tale around a leader shouldering an impossible burden. Sharp, thoughtful golden-age SF. Read it for a story of power and exhaustion at the summit, as a president confronts the machinery of a world careening toward catastrophe.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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