G. Gordon Dewey 20 min read

Aging beauty Ninon stretches catlike on her couch, fiercely denying to herself the first stiffness of joints and the threat of a single dreaded wrinkle, for she means never to grow old.

G. Gordon Dewey's 1953 story is a sharp social-SF and time-travel tale. Clever, ironic golden-age SF. Read it for a story of vanity and the desperate pursuit of eternal youth, where a woman obsessed with staving off age reaches for time itself, building through her fierce denial toward a neat, mordant golden-age twist.

In its time

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

Reading it

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