Harry Warner 30 min read

What better use for a time machine than handling department-store complaints? At the Hartshorne-Logan Christmas party, chaos reigns, but pleasing a customer should surely have its limits.

Harry Warner's 1956 story spins genial social-SF and time-travel comedy from retail customer service run amok. Fun, wry golden-age SF. Read it for a delightful story where a store's time-machine solution to unhappy customers leads to gloriously unintended consequences.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay