Algis Budrys 35 min read

A vendor of dreams, purveying impossible worlds to millions, Rufus Sollenar surveys nighted Manhattan from his crystal tower, doomed by the one thing he cannot see about himself.

Algis Budrys's 1961 story is a superb, stylish social-SF tale. Sharp, gripping, brilliantly written. Read it for one of Budrys's finest works, a ruthless media mogul's paranoid flight from a rival's uncanny revenge, told with dazzling noir style and cold psychological insight, in a classic golden-age piece about ambition, guilt, and the things we refuse to see.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Dick Francis