Mack Reynolds 1 hr 5 min read

Dr. Frederick Braun studies the two-story wooden house, small lawn, one tree, an ostentatious hover car at the curb, and admits it's the most average-looking dwelling he has ever seen.

Mack Reynolds's 1963 story is a sharp dystopian social-SF tale of a search for the truly average American. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a story where the hunt for a perfectly ordinary common man in an engineered society reveals something anything but ordinary beneath the surface.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

1 hr 5 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

George Schelling