Arnold Castle 8 min read

Quitting time at Utopian Appliances, and its stocky president Bernard leaves the office with genial calm, a man of middle age who has learned that life has other demands and pleasures.

Arnold Castle's 1960 story is a wry dystopian and social-SF tale. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a story that begins in the ordinary rhythms of corporate life and slides toward something stranger about work, leisure, and the shape of a regimented future, in a well-turned golden-age piece with a quiet, unsettling undercurrent.

In its time

Published in 1960, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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