George H. Smith 15 min read

Revolutionary War hero Colonel Johns has a unique and painful experience: meeting his own great-great-great-great-granddaughter, and now maybe he'll reconsider the girl he means to marry.

George H. Smith's 1954 story is a wry colonization and military-SF time-travel comedy. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial tale where a patriotic dinner and a founding father collide with the paradoxes of time, and history proves more personal, and more changeable, than anyone expected.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Rudolph Palais