Edward W. Ludwig 25 min read

Slowly, one, two, three, four, Tom Rogers climbs to the Division of Licenses, hoping against hope he has failed the tests, that they won't give him a license, that he won't have to drive.

Edward W. Ludwig's 1956 story is a sharp dystopian social-SF tale of a deadly rite of passage. Clever, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story where obtaining a driver's license has become a terror, and a reluctant man's dread of the road reveals a grim truth about the drivers and the world they race through.

In its time

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

Reading it

25 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Mel Hunter