Raymond F. Jones 1 hr 47 min read

Dr. William Baker is fifty and doesn't mind it a bit, a tremendously satisfying age, when a man's name stands alone without apology on the foundation of a lifetime's work well spent.

Raymond F. Jones's 1962 story is a sharp hard-SF and social-SF tale of science and orthodoxy. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a self-satisfied establishment scientist confronts a challenge to accepted thinking, and the great gray plague of the title proves to be a sickness of the mind, not the body.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

1 hr 47 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).