Walter J. Sheldon 7 min read

The great Computer could do no wrong, until a quiet little man with a head like a light bulb and a secret smile came to Computer City and asked it one simple little question.

Walter J. Sheldon's 1958 story is a wry dystopian and social-SF tale. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a genial cautionary comedy where an innocent-seeming question undoes the infallible reasoning machine that runs society, in a well-turned golden-age piece about the limits of pure logic and the mischief a simple mind can make.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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