Damon Knight 25 min read

A man arrives in an unnaturally mild December Manhattan for a meeting that will test just how strange the world can get.

Damon Knight's 1956 story sets a wry, observant narrator loose in a New York enjoying freak October weather the week after Christmas, walking into an encounter that quietly bends the rules of the possible. Knight, one of the genre's sharpest minds and critics, writes with cool precision and a psi-era twist. Read it for polished, understated 1950s SF from a true craftsman of the short form.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

25 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Robert Engle