Stephen Bartholomew 17 min read

In a rigidly ordered future where arriving home off-schedule is a breach of etiquette, lab worker Charles is summoned and told the Textile Industry is in dire straits.

Stephen Bartholomew's 1958 story is a sharp dystopian social-SF satire of conformity. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a wry story of a suffocatingly standardized society and one man's 'bright idea' to game its rules, in a neat, ironic critique of a world that has engineered away all individuality.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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