Rog Phillips 22 min read

When eccentric physics prof Judson Taylor lays a small silver object on the table, the exasperated narrator Bill Halley asks 'Where are we?', the opening of a wry tale of a most unusual invention.

Rog Phillips's 1948 story is a wry AI-and-social-SF tale. Clever, fun golden-age SF. Read it for a genial campus comedy where a professor's strange device, the Tillie of the title, upends the lives of the physics faculty, in a light, inventive golden-age piece that mixes academic humor with a clever science-fictional gadget.

In its time

Published in 1948, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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