Frank Belknap Long 23 min read

Daring Moonson bears a proud, brave name, but cannot say it aloud without fear, in a far future that has cured everything except the terror in a man's own heart.

Frank Belknap Long's 1954 story is a thoughtful social-SF and time-travel tale. Sharp, humane golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a man from a perfected future flees back through the centuries in search of the one thing his utopia lost, the courage to live fully, with the whole body and not the mind alone.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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