Poul Anderson 28 min read

In a shabby Asian-quartered bar, the drunken Barwell tells Radek that the chickens flew the coop three hundred years ago and are coming home to roost, a story about immortality and its price.

Poul Anderson's 1956 story is a thoughtful hard-SF and social-SF tale. Sharp, sobering golden-age SF. Read it for an intelligent Anderson story about the discovery, and suppression, of immortality, and what such a secret does to those who hold it and those denied it, in a well-turned golden-age piece asking what it profits a man to live forever.

In its time

Published in 1956, 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

Ed Emshwiller