William Tenn 11 min read

Whoever named it should have known better, you don't call a top-secret project 'Hush' and expect nobody to get curious. Now everyone on it reports twice a week for dream-detailing and hypnoanalysis.

William Tenn's 1954 story is a sharp, funny military and social-SF satire of secrecy taken to absurd extremes. Clever, wry golden-age SF. Read it for a delicious story where the very effort to keep a project hidden becomes its own comic undoing, with a perfect final twist.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Dick Francis