Allen Kim Lang 12 min read

A mangled corpse in a dark tunnel beneath the surface holds a group of travelers captive, and teaches them, at gunpoint of the dreaded secret police, a hard lesson about what freedom really means.

Allen Kim Lang's 1956 story is a sharp first-contact and social-SF tale. Tense, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a taut story set in an oppressive future policed by a brutal secret police, where a death in an underground passage forces a reckoning with tyranny and liberty, in a well-turned golden-age piece with a hard political edge.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Robert Engle