Consignment is a sharp mid-century science fiction story by Alan E. Nourse, combining medical speculation, moral pressure, and the uneasy human cost of technological progress. Nourse brings the precision of a physician and the pace of a practiced science fiction storyteller to a future in which systems meant to serve human need may also reduce human beings to inventory, obligation, or expendable material. Compact and unsettling, the story turns on the tension between efficiency, conscience, and the value of an individual life.
First published during the classic magazine era of American science fiction, Consignment reflects Nourse's characteristic interest in medicine, social organisation, institutional power, and the ethical consequences of scientific advance. Readers of Golden Age science fiction, medical science fiction, dystopian speculation, classic short fiction, and socially engaged speculative writing will find here the clear narrative drive and moral seriousness that mark Nourse's best work. Explore other exciting Positronic Books devoted to classic science fiction, fantasy, and mystery.
Alan E. Nourse was an American physician and writer whose science fiction often drew on medicine, biology, ethics, technology, and the social consequences of scientific change. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1928, Nourse served in the United States Navy and trained as a doctor before building a writing career that included both fiction and nonfiction. His medical background gave many of his stories a distinctive seriousness, especially when dealing with illness, institutions, research, human vulnerability, and the moral responsibilities of scientific knowledge.Nourse wrote numerous short stories and novels during the mid-twentieth-century science fiction magazine era and became known for clear storytelling, plausible speculation, and ethical conflict. His best-known works include The Bladerunner, which later lent its title to the film Blade Runner, though the film was not based on Nourse's novel. His fiction remains of interest to readers of classic science fiction, medical science fiction, Golden Age science fiction, social speculation, dystopian futures, and the development of science fiction as a literature of scientific and moral consequence.
