Alfred Bester 1 hr 8 min read

Someone should gather all those mad-scientist stories and burn them, the narrator says, for here is a different kind: a whole world that wants to rule one man, hunting him to change his life.

Alfred Bester's 1942 story is a clever, inventive hard-SF and time-travel tale. Sharp, dazzling golden-age SF (early Bester). Read it for a bright, ingenious story of a future that can compute the consequences of the smallest act, and the cosmic catastrophe that hinges on the push of a single finger.

In its time

Published in 1942, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

1 hr 8 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Charles Schneeman