Robert Scott 14 min read

A brick smashes through the office window on People's Day, the sanctioned once-every-four-years day of chaos, as a nervous first-timer learns from an old hand how to survive the annual riot.

Robert Scott's 1962 story spins a sharp psi-and-social-SF satire from a society that schedules its own misrule. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a wry story about a civilization that vents its rage on a designated day, and the man experiencing it for the first time.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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