Stephen Marlowe 22 min read

It's funny how a silly little habit can save your life, like patting the brakes out of habit as the car rolls down the driveway, and finding, this morning, that they don't hold.

Stephen Marlowe's 1955 story is a taut psi-powers and social-SF thriller of a man targeted for death. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a tense story where a private detective's small routines keep saving him from 'accidents,' and he must figure out who, using what uncanny means, is trying to kill him.

In its time

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

Reading it

22 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).