Wyman Guin 40 min read

The narrator's grandest cosmic gag is coming true: three tiny winged mutants of his own creation stir in the accelerator, and his heart bounds, as his roller-skating daughter pounds at the lab door.

Wyman Guin's 1956 story is a wry, inventive first-contact and social-SF tale. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a delightful story of a geneticist who breeds a race of little winged people as an elaborate hoax on the world, only to find the cosmos has a nastier sense of humor than he does, in a witty golden-age piece with a memorable sting.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Dick Francis