Joe L. Hensley 16 min read

It didn't matter that he'd quit, he was still one of the guilty, and he'd seen it in her eyes. John Rush tucks the covers around his dying wife as his blind, silent twins move beside him.

Joe L. Hensley's 1959 story is a bleak, affecting post-apocalyptic and social-SF tale of guilt and its inheritance. Sharp, haunting golden-age SF. Read it for a quietly devastating story of a man's complicity in catastrophe, and the strange children who bear its mark.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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