Richard Banks 15 min read

In a cozy classroom amid the ruined, empty skyscrapers of New York, old Miss Hippiness smiles at her twelve children and prepares to teach, for the very last time.

Richard Banks's 1962 story is a poignant dystopian and social-SF tale. Elegiac, affecting golden-age SF. Read it for a quietly moving story, echoing Zola's tale of the same name, of a final lesson at the end of an age, where a teacher's last class marks the passing of a world, in a tender, memorable golden-age piece about endings and what endures.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Dan Adkins