Jefferson Highe 28 min read

Braced against the blackboard as if crucified, teacher John Ward faces a classroom of boys with faces like identical metal stampings, and feels the mob-tension in the schoolyard about to break.

Jefferson Highe's 1954 story is a tense psi-powers and social-SF tale. Sharp, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a gripping story of a teacher confronting something monstrous rising among his uniform, mechanical pupils, its title drawn from Yeats's 'The Second Coming,' in a well-turned golden-age piece about conformity, dread, and a terrible new thing slouching to be born.

In its time

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

Reading it

28 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Dick Francis