Leslie Waltham 28 min read

By the twenty-third century, crime itself has ceased to exist, the lower emotions bred out of humanity, each citizen wearing an emotiograph, tried not for deeds but for feeling.

Leslie Waltham's 1955 story is a sharp dystopian social-SF tale of a society that criminalizes feeling. Clever, chilling golden-age SF. Read it for a pointed story where a future without crime puts a man on trial for his emotions, and the machinery of perfect order reveals its own quiet horror.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Peter Poulton