Julian F. Grow 32 min read

Nobody knows where it will end, but the narrator knows where it began: with his prickly fiancée Sara waving an ordinary pencil and demanding why it hasn't changed in three hundred years.

Julian F. Grow's 1963 story is a wry, clever first-contact and social-SF tale. Sharp, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story that spins a whole crisis out of a simple question about why progress has stalled, in a witty golden-age piece about complacency, change, and the trouble with truth.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Lutjens