Fritz Leiber 7 min read

Have you found out about the Big Engine? It's all around us, can't you hear it even now? A man offers his own screwy theory of what really makes the wheels of the world go round.

Fritz Leiber's 1962 story is a sharp, paranoid dystopian social-SF tale. Clever, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a short, sly story where a rambling narrator's theory of the hidden machinery driving all existence lands somewhere genuinely disquieting, from a master of modern SF and horror.

In its time

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

Reading it

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