Bruce McAllister 14 min read

The Voice told him to call her Diane, and to mate with her every noon when the water is brightest, for they live in a 'tank,' and the Voice, which knows what is best, is always to be obeyed.

Bruce McAllister's 1963 story is a haunting, unsettling post-apocalyptic and social-SF tale. Sharp, eerie golden-age SF (a striking early work). Read it for a disturbing story told by a man raised as an animal in a tank, whose dawning awareness of the faces outside the glass opens onto a terrible truth.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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