Murray Leinster 32 min read

The career of The Leader remains a mystery: an illegitimate, uneducated, hysterical man who by sheer force of personality seized a great nation and made fanatics of the discontented.

Murray Leinster's 1962 story is a sharp psi-powers and social-SF tale probing the roots of tyranny. Clever, chilling golden-age SF. Read it for a story that treats a Hitler-like demagogue's uncanny hold over a people as a genuine mystery to be solved, with a science-fictional answer to how such a man commands worship.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

H. R. Van Dongen