Stanley G. Weinbaum 25 min read

Chronically late Dixon Wells owns a machine that shows the worlds of 'if', glimpses of the lives he might have led had he only, for once, been on time.

Stanley G. Weinbaum's 1935 story is a charming, poignant alternate-history and hard-SF tale. Clever, warm, superbly told. Read it for a gem from the brilliant, short-lived Weinbaum, a device that reveals the roads not taken, in a witty, bittersweet story about chance, regret, and the tantalizing might-have-beens of a single wasted moment.

In its time

Published in 1949, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

25 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).