Winston K. Marks 42 min read

Love comes late to Dr. Sylvester Murt, it takes the epidemic of 1961 to break his resistance, as a plague of falling in love sweeps the whole world.

Winston K. Marks's 1954 story spins a wry first-contact and social-SF tale from a worldwide epidemic of romance. Clever, charming golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story where love itself becomes a contagion, and a resident pathologist finds himself the least immune of all.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

William Ashman