Bryce Walton 20 min read

We, Sam Lewis thinks in the dark, trying to sober up, are the living dead, buried too long in Secret Project X or whatever infantile code letter names the legalized tomb they've been shut inside.

Bryce Walton's 1957 story is a bleak, angry dystopian social-SF tale of scientists imprisoned by their own secret work. Sharp, bitter golden-age SF. Read it for a story that gives voice to the despair of the classified researcher, walled off from life in the name of security.

In its time

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

Reading it

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