Stephen Bartholomew 10 min read

Joseph's ears ache from the copter and his earplugs, and lately every little thing makes him irritable, in a world drowning in the ceaseless clatter of machines.

Stephen Bartholomew's 1957 story is a sharp dystopian social-SF tale of a deafening future. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a story where the ceaseless racket of an industrial civilization has become a torment, and one man's growing irritation opens onto an unsettling truth about the rumble and the roar.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller