Waste Not, Want

In a future where consumption is law, elderly engineer Fred Lubway has just lost his wife Tillie and the only thing that made his mechanized life bearable. The city demands he produce, consume, and obey. Every resource must be used. Every quota must be met. And God help anyone who falls behind. When Fred's grief curdles into defiance, refusing to consume what he's forced to build, the ration-cops arrive to correct his attitude through more than persuasion. Dryfoos, writing in the anxious aftermath of mid-century American prosperity, constructed a razor-sharp parable about a world that measures human worth in output and punishes the soul that dares to want something more. The novella aches with loneliness and builds to a confrontation that asks whether it's better to think freely in a cell or smile happily after someone removes the part of you that knows you're caged. For readers who found The Lottery too quiet or Fahrenheit 451 too optimistic, here is your warning: they are always watching, and they will always call it care.