Robert Sheckley 18 min read

Lying on his bed before a date with the girl he's just realized he loves, Anders is jolted by a voice crying 'Help me!' out of nowhere, the disquieting opening of a strange journey inward.

Robert Sheckley's 1953 story is a brilliant, unsettling psi-powers and social-SF tale. Sharp, hallucinatory, superbly turned. Read it for one of Sheckley's finest, a mysterious disembodied voice that leads an ordinary man to unravel the very structure of his perception of reality, in a dizzying, philosophically vertiginous golden-age gem that builds to an unforgettable ending.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller