Richard S. Shaver 26 min read

It seems to be the same tree that keeps getting in his way, he runs into it, sprawls, and gets up bloody-nosed, running again through a gray fog of the mind, not knowing who or where or why he is.

Richard S. Shaver's 1948 story is a disorienting social-SF space opera of a hunted mind. Vivid, feverish golden-age pulp. Read it for a Shaver tale that opens in blind panic and unravels a conspiracy against a man robbed of his very self, told with the hallucinatory intensity that made his work notorious.

In its time

Published in 1948, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Malcolm Smith