Philip José Farmer 26 min read

Jack Crane lies motionless all morning in a vacant lot, a fugitive resembling a heap of rags, hiding from the Bohas agents, and never learning the nice man's name until it is far too late.

Philip José Farmer's 1953 story is a sharp, unsettling first-contact and social-SF tale. Clever, disquieting golden-age SF. Read it for an inventive Farmer story of a hunted man in a regimented future, building through paranoia toward a strange revelation, in a well-crafted golden-age piece with a memorably eerie idea glittering at its heart.

In its time

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

Reading it

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