C. M. Kornbluth 32 min read

Faint with hunger, the sculptor Halvorsen brings his designs to the Chancery, a fine artist scraping to survive in a society where machines have made handmade art obsolete.

C. M. Kornbluth's 1951 story is a poignant, biting AI-and-social-SF tale. Sharp, moving, superbly told. Read it for a powerful Kornbluth story about the fate of the human artist in an age of automated abundance, where craft and vocation are rendered worthless by technology, in a well-turned golden-age piece of real feeling and mordant social insight.

In its time

Published in 1951, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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