Alice Eleanor Jones 20 min read

Steven Russell was born a misfit in a perfect twenty-first century, an inexplicable child who did not like perfection, whose baby face sometimes wore an expression of pure distaste.

Alice Eleanor Jones's 1955 story is a sharp dystopian social-SF tale of a too-perfect future. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a rebel born into a smothering utopia of plastic comforts refuses its perfection, and the happy clown of the title masks something the flawless world would rather he never saw.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas