Albert Teichner 11 min read

'Everything in this wing is genuine old fake,' Stahl tells the tourists, even the strongbox money, the finest American counterfeit; for the worthless real stuff is far harder to get than good fakes.

Albert Teichner's 1962 story is a wry, clever hard-SF and social-SF satire. Sharp, ironic golden-age SF. Read it for a story where authenticity has been turned upside down, and the finest forgeries are prized above the genuine article, in a pointed meditation on value, imitation, and the real thing.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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