C. M. Kornbluth 22 min read

'Why can't I buy the Nicolaides Collection?' President Folsom XXIV demands, and his Treasury Secretary, feeling a thread-like feeling across his throat, must tell him: no money.

C. M. Kornbluth's 1953 story is a sharp, cynical psi-powers and social-SF tale of a decaying dynasty. Clever, biting golden-age SF. Read it for vintage Kornbluth, a portrait of a rotten hereditary government and the calculated remedy set in motion to answer an evil that has festered under the sun.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas