Alan Edward Nourse 14 min read

'My name is Jimmy and I am five years old, and my friend Bobby is five too', but Bobby says he's really grown up, and out in the country, far from the city, the two are inseparable.

Alan E. Nourse's 1963 story builds a quietly chilling psi-and-social-SF tale from a small boy's account of his special friend. Sharp, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story whose innocent child's-eye narration slowly reveals something deeply disquieting about Bobby.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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