Robert F. Young 9 min read

A starving tribe files down from the fissured hills to the sea, faces caved in with hunger, for in this ruined future, survival hangs on the hunting of dogs, and the dogless days have been many.

Robert F. Young's 1957 story is a bleak, poetic post-apocalyptic tale. Elegiac, atmospheric, superbly told. Read it for a haunting, Rubáiyát-haunted vision of degraded humanity scraping to survive on a wasted Earth, in a mournful, beautifully written golden-age meditation on the ruin of empires and the endurance of the human remnant.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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