Bryce Walton 11 min read

Gray with fatigue under his wrinkled brown, an old man of the Home Guard hobbles through the rubble, ragged uniform blending into the ruins like a lizard into sand, listening for the Children.

Bryce Walton's 1956 story is a somber, atmospheric post-apocalyptic and social-SF tale. Vivid, poignant golden-age SF. Read it for a haunting story of a failing old soldier scouting a ruined world, where the gulf between the last of the old and the strange new Children marks a chasm that cannot be crossed.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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