Richard Wilson 19 min read

A men's furnishings buyer settles into a chair, adjusts his heavy spectacles, breathes deep, and is off, shot out of a tunnel into blazing sunlight behind the wheel of a car he's never driven.

Richard Wilson's 1955 story opens on an uncanny slip into another life, building a wry first-contact and time-travel tale. Sharp, inventive golden-age SF. Read it for a clever story where an ordinary man keeps finding himself, disconcertingly, somewhere and someone else.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban