Richard Ashby 12 min read

Far from his home seas in both time and dimension, a hungry creature called the Irritant prowls cold, unfamiliar voids, hunting through a time that moves not in a line but in every direction.

Richard Ashby's 1953 story is an inventive alternate-history and time-travel tale. Clever, ambitious golden-age SF. Read it for a story compared to Leinster's classic 'Sidewise in Time', an audacious scramble of branching timelines and sideways dimensions, told partly from a strange predator's viewpoint, in a bold golden-age piece about the many directions of time.

In its time

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

Reading it

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