Philip K. Dick 1 hr 56 min read

He can fix anything, clocks, refrigerators, destinies, which is the problem, because a repairman from the past has no business in a future whose war-predicting computers can't handle him.

Philip K. Dick's 1953 novella is a superb, fast-moving hard-SF and time-travel tale. Ingenious, gripping, quintessential Dick. Read it for early PKD at his most exciting, a humble handyman accidentally yanked into a rigidly calculated future, whose sheer unpredictability upends a coming interstellar war, in a rich, propulsive golden-age classic.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

1 hr 56 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).

Illustrated by

Alex Ebel