Frederik Pohl 33 min read

'My name is Foraminifera 9-Hart Bailey's Beam, and I am of adequate age and size', so a fugitive from a tedious future addresses us, having fled, of all the eras, into ours.

Frederik Pohl's 1956 story is a witty, inventive social-SF and time-travel tale of clashing eras. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial romp where a bored time-traveler, a street gang, and figures from other centuries collide, told partly in the untranslatable voice of a visitor from the far future.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller