Gordon R. Dickson 25 min read

The pompous physicist Croton Myers won't let the exasperated Philton J. Bugsomer use the time-grapple, all that folderol about disrupting the fabric of time, so Bugsomer resolves to use it anyway.

Gordon R. Dickson's 1952 story is a wry hard-SF and time-travel comedy. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story of academic vanity and forbidden temptation, where a slighted researcher's determination to meddle with time leads to predictably chaotic results, in a light, well-turned golden-age piece told through his indignant diary.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

W. E. Terry