James Blish 23 min read

In an underground world sealed against a devastated surface, medical director Samuel Carson passes daily through a suspicious scanner, in a society paying the long price of survival after atomic war.

James Blish's 1956 story is a sharp post-apocalyptic and social-SF tale. Thoughtful, grim golden-age SF. Read it for a well-crafted story of humanity driven underground by nuclear and biological war, and the steep, unforeseen cost of clawing back toward the surface, in a probing golden-age piece about survival and the piper who must be paid.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban