Winston K. Marks 15 min read

In a deathless world where nearly everyone holds an M.D., a woman is dying, and physician Webb Fellow stands over Anne Tabor's mercury bath, wondering how death can come at all.

Winston K. Marks's 1955 story is a thoughtful dystopian and social-SF tale. Sharp, poignant golden-age SF. Read it for an intriguing story of a future that has conquered death, and the strange, sad meaning of dying in a world of immortals, in a well-turned golden-age piece about love, mortality, and what is lost when nothing need ever end.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller