Mari Wolf 35 min read

The First Day of spring, the man at the weather tower said, and Trina laughs at the thought of summer, riding home as the world's masters make ready to lengthen the days and warm the whole planet.

Mari Wolf's 1954 story is a lyrical, unsettling AI-and-social-SF tale of a managed world. Sharp, evocative golden-age SF. Read it for a story where the seasons themselves are switched on and off by machines, and a young woman's idyllic ride reveals the strange truth of the controlled paradise she lives in.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller