Sam Merwin 29 min read

The house has every luxury, including women, if only its lease could be broken. Roger Tennant crosses the lawn toward a mansion whose three wings each mimic a different world and age.

Sam Merwin's 1950 story is a sharp, unsettling first-contact and social-SF tale of humans kept in gilded captivity. Clever, disquieting golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a life of every comfort proves to be a very carefully baited trap.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

James Vincent