Robert Silverberg 15 min read

It's going to be the show of the century, the specially built Ultrarama theater, an eight-block line outside, and Paul Hendriks determined to get a pair of tickets to whatever it is.

Robert Silverberg's 1957 story is a clever hard-SF and social-SF tale of total immersive entertainment. Sharp, prophetic golden-age SF. Read it for a story that imagines a spectacle so real it blurs into life itself, and the crowds desperate to experience it.

In its time

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

Reading it

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