Mack Reynolds 31 min read

'You go door to door peddling soap in this day and age?' Mr. Coty marvels at young Warren Dickens and his brown paper bag, 'you'd do better on unemployment; it's permanent now.'

Mack Reynolds's 1962 story is a sharp dystopian social-SF tale set in a future of guaranteed idleness. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for Reynolds probing a society where almost no one needs to work, and a door-to-door salesman's stubborn hustle turns out to be a quietly subversive act.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

31 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

John Schoenherr