Robert Silverberg 11 min read

'Interrogation? Torture, you mean!' one of the three prisoners glares, as Conway Kroll greets them with steely politeness, for it is his job to compel them to divulge what they know.

Robert Silverberg's 1956 story is a sharp, chilling dystopian social-SF tale. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a taut story of a professional interrogator for a tyrannical state, and the reckoning that awaits a man who has made a career of extracting the truth by force.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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