Robert Silverberg 20 min read

A mother of extraordinary determination raises her many children by a rigid, calculated system, in a strange, unsettling story that turns the old nursery rhyme toward something stranger.

Robert Silverberg's 1958 story is a sharp dystopian and social-SF tale. Clever, disquieting golden-age SF. Read it for an inventive early Silverberg piece that spins the familiar rhyme of the old woman with too many children into a chilling meditation on control, conformity, and mass-produced humanity, in a well-crafted golden-age tale with a twist.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller