Monette Cummings 6 min read

Sent alone to work far out, he doesn't know how he'd have stood the four months without her, but she's company, and one can talk to her, though no one is allowed to keep pets of any kind.

Monette Cummings's 1957 story builds a poignant dystopian social-SF tale around a lonely, simple man and his forbidden companion. Tender, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a moving story of isolation and a secret pet, in a rigid society with no room for either.

In its time

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

Reading it

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