Irving E. Fang 10 min read

The narrator's beloved red Thunderflash is finished after a crash, and with a 40-year payment pact running to 2117, he faces strange new car trouble in a future mad for automobiles.

Irving E. Fang's 1958 story is a wry, satirical first-contact and social-SF tale. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a breezy send-up of consumer culture and the automobile obsession, where a fender-bender opens onto something far stranger, in a genial golden-age satire with a sharp edge beneath the humor.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban