Fredric Brown 5 min read

'The first time machine, gentlemen,' Professor Johnson tells his colleagues, a small model good for jumps of twelve minutes, as he prepares to send a brass cube into the future.

Fredric Brown's 1954 story is a brilliant, ingenious time-travel tale. Clever, elegant, superbly turned. Read it for a small masterpiece of the paradox story, a modest little time-machine demonstration that spirals, with perfect logic, into a delicious tangle, from a writer celebrated for the neatest and most satisfying twists in all of science fiction.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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