Alan Edward Nourse 38 min read

When Roger Strang realizes someone is killing his son, horribly, and again and again, he starts investigating, and stumbles onto another investigation entirely: one into his own life.

Alan E. Nourse's 1953 story is a taut time-travel and social-SF mystery of repeated murder and hidden identity. Sharp, twisty golden-age SF. Read it for a gripping tale where a father's search to protect his child unravels a far stranger truth about who he really is.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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