Clare Winger Harris 17 min read

When an athlete loses limbs and organs one by one to accident and disease, science replaces each with an artificial part, until the unsettling question arises of how much of the man remains.

Clare Winger Harris's 1929 story is a pioneering hard-SF tale by an early woman of the genre. Thoughtful, prescient, of its era. Read it for a landmark story of prosthetics and identity from one of science fiction's first notable female writers, a prophetic, philosophically probing exploration of where the human ends and the artificial begins.

In its time

Published in 1929, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Frank R. Paul