Ron Goulart 18 min read

Back in San Francisco after two months away, Pendleton strolls through Chinatown toward Beth's apartment, a warm Saturday, everything pleasantly, ordinarily itself. Or so it seems.

Ron Goulart's 1960 story is a wry alternate-history and social-SF tale where the ordinary quietly shifts. Clever, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a man's familiar city and life begin, subtly and then alarmingly, to change around him, in Goulart's deft, deadpan style.

In its time

Published in 1960, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Harman