Roger D. Aycock 11 min read

'You have no choice,' the patrolman says on Heric's veranda. 'The Council sends for you.' They've found out about Heric's dreams, and now the mild grain-overseer will be put through the adjuster.

Roger D. Aycock's 1950 story is a tense dystopian social-SF space opera of a conformist society and a dangerous dreamer. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a story where merely to dream forbidden dreams is a crime, and one ordinary man refuses to be adjusted into someone else.

In its time

Published in 1950, 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

Paul Calle