Joseph Samachson 15 min read

Palmer loves his wife as much as ever, which is exactly why, on their lonely asteroid outpost, he has hit upon his simple little scheme, and stilled his conscience that it's for her own good.

Joseph Samachson's 1952 story is a wry, dark dystopian social-SF tale of a marriage and a bad habit. Clever, ironic golden-age SF. Read it for a genial-seeming domestic story with a sinister undercurrent, where a husband's plan to cure his wife on a desolate space outpost curdles toward something far worse.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller