Rog Phillips 49 min read

'I'm never going to take my last breath,' one man boasts at a party, 'I'll just take my next-to-last breath and hold it.' The talk turns, uneasily, to fated death.

Rog Phillips's 1952 story opens on party banter about predestination that curdles into a genuine time-travel mystery. Sharp, thoughtful golden-age SF. Read it for a clever tale that begins with a dinner-party joke and reaches toward the question of whether death can be dodged.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

W. E. Terry