Randall Garrett 31 min read

A Cambridge scholar sends an old friend copies of strange letters received by Isaac Newton three hundred years ago, a queer bit of historical research that opens onto something impossible.

Randall Garrett's 1957 story frames a clever psi-and-social-SF tale as an epistolary mystery reaching back to Newton himself. Sharp, ingenious golden-age SF. Read it for a witty story where a dusty archive yields a puzzle that quietly rewrites what we thought we knew.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas