Leo P. Kelley 12 min read

'Going to the circus?' the sallow man asks on the monorail. Kevin nods without looking, 'The Great Golden Ball is supposed to be really something; it's amazing what science can do nowadays.'

Leo P. Kelley's 1957 story is a sharp dystopian social-SF tale of a too-perfect future. Clever, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a worried man rides toward a marvelous futuristic circus, and the human element of the title proves the one thing all that science cannot quite eliminate.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban