Allen Kim Lang 51 min read

Burning east on U.S. Twenty at ninety in a sealed space-suit, the narrator is pulled over by a state cop who tells him to unscrew the fishbowl, which is the one thing he can never do.

Allen Kim Lang's 1960 story is a poignant colonization and social-SF tale. Sharp, humane golden-age SF. Read it for a striking story of people who must live their whole lives sealed inside protective suits, cut off from the world outside, in a well-turned golden-age piece, its title apt, about isolation, freedom, and the longing to breathe unfiltered air.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Dick Francis