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by Fritz Leiber (Author)
In a bomb-scarred future New York, fashion, violence, sex, and spectacle have twisted into a grim new social order. Wysten Turner, a British visitor in wartime America, encounters a masked young woman who seems desperate to escape her brutal world. What begins as an apparent rescue quickly turns darker, drawing Turner into a society where women hide their faces as public display, violence has become entertainment, and desire is tangled with danger, performance, and manipulation.
First published in the November 1950 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, Coming Attraction is one of Fritz Leiber's sharpest short works: compact, disturbing, and far ahead of its time in its treatment of media culture, sexual power, postwar anxiety, and the theatrical cruelty of modern life. Project Gutenberg's text identifies the story as originally produced from Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1950, and the story's bibliographic record likewise places it in that issue. For readers of classic science fiction, dystopian fiction, postwar SF, gender-focused speculative fiction, and the darker side of magazine-era storytelling, Coming Attraction shows Leiber using the future not as escape, but as a mask held up to the present. Explore other exciting Positronic Books devoted to classic science fiction, fantasy, and mystery.
