Richard Wilson 5 min read

At dusk a weary sergeant looks south toward the enemy lines, where there are no walking wounded, only bodies piled on flatbed trucks, and shudders at the obscene new nature of this war.

Richard Wilson's 1957 story is a sharp, disturbing military-SF and social-SF tale. Pointed, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a grim, thoughtful story that slowly reveals the horrifying truth about who, or what, 'the enemy' really is, in a mordant golden-age meditation on war, killing, and the meaning of conflict.

In its time

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

Reading it

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