Carl Jacobi 19 min read

On his fortieth birthday, deciding life is too short for his rut, Martin Sutter empties his savings and buys a blue-bonneted electric runabout, the first step into a necromantic nightmare.

Carl Jacobi's 1947 story spins an offbeat first-contact and social-SF tale from a shell-collector's mid-life reinvention gone strange. Wry, imaginative golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story where a fresh start tips its everyman hero into a very peculiar predicament.

In its time

Published in 1947, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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