R. R. Winterbotham 14 min read

What makes the mass of this tiny asteroid fluctuate in defiance of all known law? An impossible fact, but then, so is the girl the men know cannot possibly exist.

R. R. Winterbotham's 1958 story is a clever hard-SF and first-contact tale of a scientific impossibility. Sharp, ingenious golden-age SF. Read it for a story where researchers on an asteroid confront balance scales that won't balance and a woman who can't be there, and the minus woman of the title upends everything they know about matter.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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