Miriam Allen De Ford 15 min read

Deliberate murder is so rare in our society that the Akkra case shocked all Newyork, the body of a young girl, skull fractured, auburn hair matted with blood, found under the Central Park mobilway.

Miriam Allen deFord's 1962 story is a sharp dystopian social-SF mystery of a killing in a near-crimeless future. Clever, absorbing golden-age SF. Read it for a story that treats a rare murder as a genuine sensation, unfolding the bizarre circumstances of a crime in a society that has all but forgotten what crime is.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Dan Adkins