Damon Knight 37 min read

All Len has to hear is the old gag, 'we've never lost a father yet', and it's thoroughly unbearable, for his child isn't even born, and it is already making itself known.

Damon Knight's 1954 story is a witty, unsettling psi-powers and social-SF tale of an extraordinary pregnancy. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a sly story where an expectant father must cope with an unborn child whose precocious mind is already reshaping the lives around it.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

William Ashman