Fritz Leiber 18 min read

On Tenthmonth 1, 2457, in a robot postal station beneath NewNew York, the mail-sorting machine Black Sorter gulps down ten thousand letters, and one of them disagrees with him violently.

Fritz Leiber's 1958 story is a witty, inventive social-SF space opera of automated mail and its discontents. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial Leiber romp through a future postal service run by temperamental robots, where a single troublesome letter throws the whole automated machinery into delightful chaos.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Diane Dillon