C. C. Beck 8 min read

A folksy painter recounts the tale of his friend Carter, an artist who built a 'perspective machine' to work everything out by formula, and then, having made it, mysteriously never used it.

C. C. Beck's 1959 story is a wry hard-SF and social-SF tale by the famed Captain Marvel artist. Clever, charming golden-age SF. Read it for a genial fable about art, intuition, and invention, where a machine that renders perfect perspective raises unsettling questions, told in a warm vernacular voice, in a well-turned golden-age piece from a legendary comics illustrator.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Martinez