Virgil F. Shockley 10 min read

Chuck Dane, lean, tanned, and refusing to feel thirty-five, dreads walking through the photoelectric beam in his own hallway that sets off that odious disc, blaring about heart attacks and cancer.

Virgil F. Shockley's 1958 story is a sharp dystopian social-SF satire of a health-obsessed future. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a wry story where a nagging, all-seeing culture of self-improvement hounds a middle-aged man at every turn, in a biting take on the tyranny of good advice.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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