Nelson S. Bond 29 min read

When the narrator's jalopy dies on a lonely dirt road, a drawling countryman leaning on a fence turns out to be a backwoods scientific genius, with wonders no city laboratory ever dreamed of.

Nelson S. Bond's 1940 story is a wry, charming hard-SF and social-SF tale. Fun, clever golden-age SF. Read it for a delightful rural-genius yarn where an unassuming country tinkerer proves a scientific marvel, in a warm, humorous golden-age piece that finds astonishing invention in the most homespun and unlikely of places.

In its time

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

Reading it

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