Dave Dryfoos 12 min read

At eighty-six, mechanical engineer Fred Lubway wakes searching for his wife Tillie, dead over a year, and finds his surroundings, his cybernetic house, all its gadgets, strange and hateful and wrong.

Dave Dryfoos's 1953 story is a sharp dystopian and social-SF tale. Pointed, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story that opens in grief and disorientation and unfolds a disquieting future of automated abundance and its hidden costs, in a well-turned golden-age piece about waste, want, and the strange discontents of a push-button world.

In its time

Published in 1953, 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

Kelly Freas