Kirk Drussai Garen Drussai 11 min read

Sydney Mercer paces his apartment, waiting anxiously for his wife, in a near-future where the aging are quietly, chillingly pressured out of a society that has decided it no longer has room for them.

Kirk and Garen Drussai's 1955 story is a sharp, humane dystopian and social-SF tale. Pointed, affecting golden-age SF. Read it for a quietly disturbing story of enforced obsolescence and the fate of the old in a youth-obsessed future, in a compassionate, unsettling look at how a society might discard its own.

In its time

Published in 1955, 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

Ed Emshwiller