Robert Silverberg 14 min read

Waking from five centuries of sleep is like fighting up from the bottom of the sea, and the man who plunged so boldly into the future finds himself, blind and terrified, in a world remade.

Robert Silverberg's 1957 story is a sharp dystopian and time-travel tale. Clever, ironic golden-age SF. Read it for a wry story of a sleeper who wakes into a transformed future only to discover it is not at all what he bargained for, in a well-turned golden-age piece that turns a bold leap into tomorrow toward a pointed, satirical revelation.

In its time

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

Reading it

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