George O. Smith 41 min read

A couple of weeks before the Derby, they're playing poker, a game of skill that has nothing to do with the velocity of horse meat, and every player is quietly trying to read the others' minds.

George O. Smith's 1958 story is a clever psi-powers and social-SF tale of telepathy and gambling. Sharp, witty golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story set in a world where everyone can read minds, and fixing a horse race, or a poker game, becomes a delightfully tangled problem of who's reading whom.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Bernklau