Melvin Sturgis 13 min read

The tiny courtroom is taut as a wire as the prosecutor moves to prove the defendant has been of unsound mind since birth, a public menace, not the mere victim of circumstance the defense claims.

Melvin Sturgis's 1951 story is a sharp psi-powers and social-SF courtroom tale. Clever, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a trial turns on a defendant's strange lifelong difference, and the gift of the title proves to be something the law has no way to comprehend.

In its time

Published in 1951, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Robert Fuqua