Jerry Sohl 21 min read

A cosmic caretaker named Smith admits to a small mistake in the Ultroom, one involving a few murders and a few thousand years, as a routine transfer of a soul into an Illinois baby goes badly wrong.

Jerry Sohl's 1952 story is a clever, inventive social-SF and time-travel tale. Sharp, engaging golden-age SF. Read it for an ingenious story of otherworldly beings meddling across the ages to correct a botched reincarnation, told with wit and mounting suspense, in a fresh spin on time-travel and immortality.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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