Manly Wade Wellman 37 min read

The gaunt, saturnine janitor at a Hollywood radio station has one distinction among Californians, no film ambitions, because he really is a mad scientist.

Manly Wade Wellman's 1940 story introduces eighty-year-old Bratton, an electrical tinkerer since Edison's day, touchy about the very role Hollywood keeps trying to cast him in. Wry, characterful social SF with a horror-movie wink. Read it for a droll golden-age tale about a genuine mad genius hiding in plain sight.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

John Giunta