Miriam Allen De Ford 17 min read

Orthedrin, maxiton, and glutamic acid made him king of his world, SK540, a laboratory rat whose brain, relative to its size, surpasses any that ever lived.

Miriam Allen De Ford's 1961 story spins a sharp psi-and-social-SF tale from a hyper-intelligent lab rat. Clever, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a chemically enhanced rodent's superior mind sets it on a path no cage was built to contain.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Wallace Wood