Jack McKenty 17 min read

Dr. Brinton's fiendishly clever alarm clock brings madness, chiming, flooding the room with light, running his bath, and its 'off' switch defeats any man not fully awake.

Jack McKenty's 1953 story is a wry hard-SF and social-SF tale. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial comedy that opens on a gloriously overengineered alarm clock and builds toward a real scientific puzzle, in a light, well-turned golden-age piece that finds both humor and ingenuity in the everyday business of gravity and weight.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Don Sibley