Charles Beaumont 32 min read

On the moving wall Mary watches a handsome man's legs blown off, while her mother, bored, tells her to read a magazine; they've all seen that a million times.

Charles Beaumont's 1952 story is a sharp, chilling dystopian social-SF tale of enforced beauty. Clever, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a pointed story where everyone is made surgically, identically beautiful at eighteen, and a girl who dreads the Transformation dares to want to stay herself.

In its time

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

Reading it

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