William P. Salton 9 min read

A man reaches for his martini and his hand freezes in mid-air, as something new and alien wakes inside his mind.

William P. Salton's 1958 story pins Paul Donovan at a bar in a moment of eerie divorcement from his own body, his consciousness seeming to float above him in amusement as a strange new power stirs. A tense, well-observed psi-era tale of sudden, uncanny transformation. Read it for creeping 1950s SF about the mind discovering it is not quite what it thought.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

9 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).