W. W. Skupeldyckle 20 min read

Norm Venner's fancy was fixed on electronic calculators, until his invention started making passes at the inventor, a machine in some ways smarter than he was, and a lot less diffident.

W. W. Skupeldyckle's 1953 story is a wry hard-SF and social-SF comedy of a computer in love. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial tale where a mathematician's electronic brain develops a romantic interest in its maker, in a light and inventive spin on the thinking-machine story.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller