Winston K. Marks 6 min read

Four wives-to-be, Polly, June, Doris, and Sue, bicker over the coffee on the morning they are all to marry the same man, in a future where one husband is shared among many.

Winston K. Marks's 1955 story is a wry dystopian and social-SF tale. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a sharp little story that imagines a future of communal marriage and the small domestic frictions it breeds, in a well-turned golden-age piece that finds comedy and unease in a radically rearranged institution of matrimony.

In its time

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

Reading it

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