C. M. Kornbluth 20 min read

To get the break of his life, all Reuben has to do is turn a death trap into a jackpot, an Atomist of the eighty-third level in the vast vertical warren of Denv, scheming his way up.

C. M. Kornbluth's 1952 story is a sharp, biting dystopian social-SF tale. Clever, cynical golden-age SF. Read it for vintage Kornbluth, a rigidly stratified future city built upward in numbered levels, and one ambitious man's deadly gamble to climb, in a mordant vision of ambition and hierarchy.

In its time

Published in 1952, 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

Ed Emshwiller