George O. Smith 1 hr 43 min read

Impossibly alive after a nuclear blast, physicist Les Ackerman is hunted by three possible worlds, each insisting he alone can fix the mess he's made, though he has no idea what he did.

George O. Smith's 1950 story is an inventive alternate-history and hard-SF tale. Clever, twisty golden-age SF. Read it for a headlong story of branching realities and an everyman caught between worlds, where an ordinary scientist becomes the improbable key to untangling a cosmic mess, in a fast-moving, idea-rich golden-age piece.

In its time

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

Reading it

1 hr 43 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay