Bryce Walton 18 min read

Sixteen-year-old Wayne sneers down the stairs at his squarehead parents, the potgut old man, the fluttering mother, marking moron time in a gray dream, glad at last to break out.

Bryce Walton's 1962 story is a sharp, unsettling dystopian social-SF tale of alienated youth. Clever, chilling golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a contemptuous teenager's longing to escape his ordinary family opens onto something far darker, and the recruit of the title is drawn toward a terrible rite of passage.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

George Schelling