Jerry Sohl 17 min read

Mrs. Briggs watches the violinists saw furiously, the conductor's baton sweeping to within inches of her head, her first encounter with Virilio's disjointed, deafening, strangely stirring new music.

Jerry Sohl's 1955 story is a wry, unsettling dystopian social-SF tale. Clever, sharp golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a woman's afternoon at an avant-garde concert becomes the entry to something stranger, and the 'elroom' of the title opens onto an unexpected dimension of experience.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban