Joseph Samachson 10 min read

Speeding past a white dwarf, careless after centuries, he is caught full in the blast when it explodes, and now, radiation-scrambled, he cannot remember the vital message he was sent to deliver.

Joseph Samachson's 1954 story imagines a being of pure energy who has lost the urgent errand that is his whole purpose. Sharp, imaginative psi-and-space-opera SF. Read it for a story of a godlike messenger struggling to recover a memory on which worlds may depend.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

W. E. Terry