David Mason 7 min read

So you know all the punchlines to the old kill-your-own-grandfather gag? Wanna bet? The pompous Pangborn insists temporal paradoxes aren't really inconsistencies, and offers to prove it.

David Mason's 1958 story spins a clever, playful time-travel tale from a dinner-table debate and a rash wager. Witty, sharp golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story where a know-it-all's theory of paradoxes gets put, riskily, to the test.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Richard Kluga