Kirby Brooks 26 min read

At fifty, a man really is too old to be found wandering around on his own ceiling, but that's what having a genius for a son does to you.

Kirby Brooks's 1953 comedy is narrated by a contented middle-aged father whose boy's antigravity invention leaves him quite literally plastered to the ceiling, meals and dignity going out the window. Light, domestic social SF with a warm, rueful voice. Read it for genial golden-age humor about the everyday havoc of a household genius.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

H. R. Smith