Fritz Leiber 8 min read

A raggedy old lady with a big shopping bag stands in the exact center of the crosswalk as a big black car bears down, the small collision that touches off the terrible war of Wheeled against Footed.

Fritz Leiber's 1963 story is a brilliant, savage dystopian satire. Sharp, funny, prophetic. Read it for a razor-edged Leiber gem, the mock-scholarly account of how a fatal jaywalking incident ignites all-out war between motorists and pedestrians, a hilarious and pointed golden-age classic about traffic, technology, and the murderous logic of the road.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

John Pederson