Rosel George Brown 41 min read

You can't beat my Uncle Isadore, he's dead but he's quick, yet that's exactly what he's daring me to try, from inside his sealed and silent ship on an alien world.

Rosel George Brown's 1958 story spins a witty space-opera puzzle from a dead relative's booby-trapped legacy. Sharp, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a clever tale of an inheritance that can only be claimed by outsmarting the tricky old man who left it.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Diane Dillon