Albert Hernhuter 8 min read

A slick black car stops before a clean white house, and a manicured man rings the bell, answered by a housewife dressed, down to her slippers, exactly as the government has ordered that week.

Albert Hernhuter's 1954 story is a wry, unsettling psi-powers and social-SF tale of enforced conformity. Clever, sharp golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a rigidly regulated future's weekly rules conceal something stranger, and meeting the little man who isn't there proves less awful than finding that he is.

In its time

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

Reading it

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