Rog Phillips 38 min read

Dr. Joseph MacNare was as normal and well-adjusted a college professor as any, until, stepping outside his own field of mathematics, he did something that made him famous, and worse.

Rog Phillips's 1958 story is a sharp, unsettling psi-and-social-SF tale of a scientist's fateful experiment. Clever, disquieting golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a perfectly sane academic's foray into psychology leads him, and a rat, somewhere deeply strange.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller