Leigh Richmond 48 min read

On a night when the news is particularly vicious, TV commentator Bill Howard reports a plague-spreading sub stuck in the Suez, as the world teeters, manipulated, toward a manufactured crisis.

Leigh Richmond's 1961 story is a sharp first-contact and social-SF tale of media, fear, and hidden influence. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a story where the poisonous manipulation of the news masks something larger reaching into human affairs.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

John Schoenherr