Jesse F. Bone 30 min read

They call it Thurston's Disease, for its discoverer, and its first victim. As a doctor mislays his matches amid lab clutter, a strange, spreading affliction begins to look like the end of humanity.

Jesse F. Bone's 1962 story is a sharp hard-SF and post-apocalyptic tale of a baffling plague with an unexpected logic. Clever, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a mysterious disease sweeping the world turns out to have a purpose no one suspected.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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