Fritz Leiber 19 min read

It wasn't until the mermaid turned up in his bathtub that Simon Grue seriously began to wonder what the Russians were doing on the roof next door.

Fritz Leiber's 1959 story is a witty fantasy and social-SF romp of Greenwich Village magic and Cold War paranoia. Funny, inventive golden-age SF. Read it for a delightful tale where a bewildered artist's bathtub mermaid is only the start of the strangeness on his block.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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