Examination Day

“Examination Day” is a classic American speculative science fiction short story. Set in an altered reality, it explores American anxieties in the 1950s around communist totalitarianism and suburban conformity through the perspective of a family struggling with their son’s entrance into adulthood. With its spare language and final plot twist, the short story drives home the moral cost of a society that doesn’t question its government’s rules and accepts conformity, no matter how it’s achieved.

“Examination Day” is also dystopian science fiction, highlighting the theme of Innocence as a Lens for Dystopian Horror. Dystopian literature is set in future or near-future societies, where life and social structures are in calamitous decline. Slesar uses this setting to explore what it would be like if contemporary social and political systems became authoritarian. In the 1950s, when the story was published, Americans were concerned about the perceived looming threat of the Stalinist communist dictatorship in the USSR. They worried that if the US lost the Cold War, a similar totalitarian regime would be instituted at home. The Soviet Union was seen as a place where