James E. Gunn 11 min read

Andrew Jones calmly announces that he is the reason there will be no more Joneses, no more anyone, for the end of the world came not by fire or ice, but by the exposure of an age-old conspiracy.

James E. Gunn's 1956 story is a wry, provocative dystopian and social-SF tale. Clever, mordant golden-age SF. Read it for a sly story that frames the battle of the sexes as humanity's deadliest war, in an ironic, coolly told account of how the world ends, not with a bang, but with a secret laid bare.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Emmanuel Stallman