Robert Abernathy 22 min read

Henry Chatham dips a fish bowl into his garden pond, gathering a cross-section of pond life for his boy Harry, never guessing what tiny watchers, magnified beneath the microscope, are gazing back.

Robert Abernathy's 1953 story is an eerie, atmospheric first-contact and horror tale of the microscopic. Sharp, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a quietly chilling story where the minute creatures of a drop of pond water prove to hold a menace, and the rotifers of the title reach out toward the world of men.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay