V. E. Thiessen 16 min read

Evening falls, and everywhere, in the cities and the country, the children are late from school, while the robotic telephones repeat that the schools are closed for the day.

V. E. Thiessen's 1958 story is a quietly chilling dystopian and social-SF tale. Sharp, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story of quiet horror from tomorrow, where automated roboteachers and a society's blind trust in them build toward a soft, creeping dread, in a well-turned golden-age piece about complacency, technology, and what we hand over to machines.

In its time

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

Reading it

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