Rog Phillips 41 min read

'So what if I spent this week's allowance getting drunk?' For a second the sneering blonde felt like his wife, but the narrator has never seen her, and no one else is in the room.

Rog Phillips's 1953 story is a disorienting psi-powers and social-SF tale of shattered identity. Sharp, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a man wakes into a life and a wife he cannot remember, and the search for his lost ego leads somewhere genuinely strange.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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