James Norman 37 min read

On a planetoid that serves as the 'brain-register of the universe,' a man wakes in a pillory before creatures whose eyes are never in the same place twice.

James Norman's 1941 story pins Bill Petrie in a medieval stocks on Uva, Planetoid 81, staring down at droves of eye-scattered beings in a fantastic marketplace, trying to piece together how he got there. Strange, inventive golden-age SF with a genuinely alien setting and a puzzle-box structure. Read it for wild pulp imagination and a delightfully disorienting world.

In its time

Published in 1941, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Leo Morey