Alfred Coppel 22 min read

In the mile-square Creche of A.D. 2500, Director Han Merrick paces in dread, for a bigot's prying into the Androids who serve Man threatens to spark a pogrom, or something far worse.

Alfred Coppel's 1953 story is a thoughtful first-contact and social-SF tale. Sharp, humane golden-age SF. Read it for a story that poses an agonizing moral choice, to save human beings at the expense of humanity, or the reverse, in the tense standoff between android-makers and a hateful demagogue, in a well-turned golden-age piece about prejudice and hard decisions.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Philip B. Parsons