Kris Neville 6 min read

Phlegmatic bargain-hunter Coxe buys a suspiciously cheap new refrigerator with a huge freezing compartment, and can't understand why the salesman couldn't find a single thing wrong with it.

Kris Neville's 1962 story is a wry first-contact and social-SF tale. Clever, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story that starts with a too-good-to-be-true appliance and slides toward something strange, in a well-turned golden-age piece that finds quiet menace and dark comedy in the most ordinary of household purchases.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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