C. M. Kornbluth & Frederik Pohl 2 hr 35 min read

Appallingly, the Earth and Moon have been kidnapped from the Solar System, and on a docile, ritual-bound future Earth, Citizen Germyn awaits, with proper calm, the Re-creation of the Sun.

Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's 1957 novel is a brilliant, strange post-apocalyptic and AI classic. Inventive, disturbing, superbly told. Read it for one of the great collaborations of the field, a hallucinatory vision of a stolen Earth, an enslaved humanity gone passive, and the vast alien Pyramids that rule them, in a wildly imaginative novel of rebellion and cosmic captivity.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

2 hr 35 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).

Illustrated by

Wallace Wood