Frederik Pohl 53 min read

Guy Burckhardt wakes screaming from a dream of a shattering explosion, into a June 15th that keeps repeating, in a town where something is deeply, terrifyingly wrong.

Frederik Pohl's 1955 story is a landmark dystopian and social-SF masterpiece. Brilliant, paranoid, unforgettable. Read it for one of the greatest SF short stories ever written, a man trapped in a single endlessly-recurring day, uncovering a horror beneath his ordinary life, in a razor-sharp nightmare of consumerism, control, and reality itself.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

53 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller