Alan Cogan 17 min read

Charles Mead stands atop Hobson's Hill, memorizing the town below and Finlay's Lumber Co., then steps into a shimmering arch of four humming black boxes and vanishes into darkness.

Alan Cogan's 1956 story is a taut alternate-history and social-SF tale of a man crossing between worlds. Sharp, twisty golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a traveler's careful preparations and a shimmering gateway lead somewhere he never quite bargained for.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Cal