Raymond E. Banks 24 min read

In a New York bar, the narrator watches Kelly's face twist with hate as a beautiful woman walks in, for she is an Ideal, and people hate Ideals, the better-looking the more they are hated.

Raymond E. Banks's 1954 story is a sharp social-SF space opera. Clever, provocative golden-age SF. Read it for a story set in a future of genetically perfect 'Ideals' and the ordinary people who resent them, unfolding a pointed drama of envy, belonging, and the price of perfection, in a well-turned golden-age piece with real social bite.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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