William Campbell Gault 49 min read

What would it be like to live in a world that has conquered the near planets but abolished all literature? Doak Parker weighs his Washington career against a suspect country girl he has just met.

William Campbell Gault's 1953 story is a sharp dystopian social-SF tale of a book-banning future. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a story where an ambitious operator in a spacefaring world with no literature must choose between his rising career and a mysterious woman tied to the outlawed mighty dead, the great writers.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

49 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).