Lucius Daniel 8 min read

Howard Kent feels the weight of years as he waits with his young, beautiful wife in the reception room of the Human Rejuvenation Plant, and prepares to make a terrible confession.

Lucius Daniel's 1954 story is a sharp dystopian and social-SF tale. Pointed, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a taut story set in a future where youth can be renewed, but at a hidden and terrible price, where an aging man's dread and a guilty secret build toward a grim revelation, in a well-turned golden-age piece about vanity, mortality, and the cost of a second chance.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Irv Docktor