Robert Bloch 2 hr 42 min read

In an unbearably overpopulated 1997, an ordinary man named Harry Collins wakes to another jam-packed day, the first thread in a sweeping tale of a world buckling under the weight of its own billions.

Robert Bloch's 1958 novel is a sharp, prophetic dystopian and social-SF tale. Vivid, provocative, superbly told. Read it for a gripping overpopulation nightmare from the author of Psycho, a decades-spanning vision of a suffocating future Earth and the radical, unsettling measures taken to save it, in a bold, thoughtful golden-age novel of dread necessity.

In its time

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

Reading it

2 hr 42 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).