Allyn Donnelson 18 min read

In a desperate letter to the President, an ordinary man confesses he's stumbled into top-secret trouble, refusing even a lawyer, after unwittingly setting off something to do with space travel.

Allyn Donnelson's 1954 story is a wry first-contact and social-SF tale. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial epistolary comedy where a bewildered everyman blunders into world-shaking secrets, told as an increasingly frantic appeal to the White House, in a light, well-turned golden-age piece about the little man caught up in enormous events.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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