Dean Evans 21 min read

The Master Clock blips on the black desk of Federal Executions, dimming the lights to Emote Neutral, and Tony Radek frowns: at a quarter past one, no man should be going to his Neg-Emote.

Dean Evans's 1952 story is a sharp dystopian social-SF tale of a coldly regulated future. Clever, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story where even emotions are metered and managed by the state, and a man at the machinery of official death confronts the human cost of a world stripped of feeling.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Thorne