Chandler Davis 13 min read

The little salesman buzzes into the narrator's hotel room exactly at ten, all bright apologetic smiles and smooth patter, pitching a product that is sharp, and a salesman sharper, and dangerous.

Chandler Davis's 1958 story is a sharp dystopian and social-SF satire. Clever, biting golden-age SF. Read it for a pointed story where a slick high-pressure sales pitch reveals the workings of a manipulated, statistics-ruled society, in a witty, unsettling golden-age piece about persuasion, consumerism, and the machinery of control.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

John Schoenherr