Robert S. Richardson 18 min read

An interview with the director of the Institute of Solar and Terrestrial Relations, who insists his startling theory about the Sun's effect on human behavior is fiction. Isn't it?

Robert S. Richardson's 1959 story (a real astronomer writing as Philip Latham) frames its hard-SF idea as a deadpan mock-interview, suggesting solar activity may govern human madness. Sharp, dryly ingenious golden-age SF. Read it for a clever tale that dresses a disquieting hypothesis as harmless make-believe.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas