Donald F. Daley 9 min read

After her husband walks out, Marigold files a protection-request form and an availability form, leaving her available for confiscation, or for the slavery pool, an Abandoned her own parents disown.

Donald F. Daley's 1963 story is a sharp dystopian social-SF tale of a woman stripped of protection. Chilling, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a cold bureaucracy reduces an abandoned wife to property, and the human cost of a system that measures a person's worth by whom they belong to.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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