Robert Moore Williams 23 min read

Before a hostile assembly of jeering scientists, the little inventor James Arthur Fradin defends a discovery they call gross nonsense, as the narrator waits, grinning, for the fireworks.

Robert Moore Williams's 1942 story is a lively hard-SF and social-SF tale. Clever, engaging golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story of a maverick inventor and the establishment that scorns him, where an 'impossible' breakthrough upsets the experts, in a witty golden-age piece about genius, ridicule, and vindication.

In its time

Published in 1942, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Hannes Bok