Frank Riley 29 min read

Sir Jacques de Carougne, Lord High Executioner for the Seventh Judicial District, spins the dial of his rocket in boredom, after a thousand kills, everything is instinct and reflex.

Frank Riley's 1956 story is a sharp dystopian social-SF tale of legalized, televised killing. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a story where dueling executions have become mass entertainment for a push-button society, and a jaded master killer confronts what his blood-sport has made of him.

In its time

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

Reading it

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