Boyd Ellanby 20 min read

In a future where machines don't just plot stories but write them, the human writer Herbert rides the moving sidewalk to Script-Lab, a relic of an age when writers earned royalties and rode in taxis.

Boyd Ellanby's 1953 story is a sharp dystopian and social-SF satire. Pointed, wry golden-age SF. Read it for a pungent story about the automation of art, where fiction-writing machines have made human authors obsolete, in a well-turned golden-age piece, sharpened by real feeling, about creativity, mechanization, and what is lost when the storytellers fall silent.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Malcolm Smith