Poul Anderson 1 hr 1 min read

It didn't come from a government lab of a thousand vetted technicians; it was the work of one man and one woman, for the basic advances are always born in loneliness.

Poul Anderson's 1955 story is a sharp hard-SF and social-SF tale of a world-changing invention. Clever, thought-provoking golden-age SF. Read it for a story about how a single revolutionary idea, born in obscurity, snowballs into forces its lonely inventors never dreamed they'd unleash.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

1 hr 1 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas