Stephen Marlowe 22 min read

Ellaby is going places: five foot nine, an I.Q. of 98.57, hair worn between a man's and a woman's, perfectly, exactly average, and trained since twenty to assassinate the Dictator.

Stephen Marlowe's 1955 story (as Milton Lesser) is a sharp dystopian space opera of a too-perfect democracy. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a society of enforced equality still craves a strongman, and the most average man alive is groomed for a most singular task.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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