Rory Magill 13 min read

The explosion brings Jim Peters bolt upright in bed. After ten years of cold war, there's only one thing to think, and he thinks it: 'I guess maybe this is it.'

Rory Magill's 1953 story is a sharp first-contact and social-SF tale that opens on the brink of feared war. Clever, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a night-time blast rouses a Cold War couple to what they assume is the end, and the truth proves stranger and more hopeful than atomic doom.

In its time

Published in 1953, 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

Ted Speicher