Robert E. Gilbert 43 min read

In a strange future of ritual dogfights and armored hobbyists, a breeder tries to sell a pup to a costumed customer who wants it only to fight, while a bull's bellow rattles the windows.

Robert E. Gilbert's 1953 story is a wry, vivid post-apocalyptic and social-SF tale. Clever, evocative golden-age SF. Read it for a colorful, strange story of a decadent far-future society and its brutal amusements, sketched with sharp, offbeat detail, in a well-turned golden-age piece that finds unsettling meaning beneath its eccentric surface.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Tom Beecham