Albert Hernhuter 6 min read

'Of course I killed him,' the thin, mirthlessly smiling literary agent Martin Cole tells the coroner's inquest, a confession that only deepens the mystery of Sanford Smith's death.

Albert Hernhuter's 1959 story is a wry first-contact and social-SF tale with a twist. Clever, engaging golden-age SF. Read it for a sly little story that opens on a coolly confessed murder and unfolds something far stranger behind the smiler's calm, in a neat, ironic gem of golden-age short SF.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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