Henry Hasse 1 hr 25 min read

Raoul Beardsley dreads it happening again today, the inexplicable pull of a machine he despises, a gutless computer that has somehow gotten under his skin and into his mind.

Henry Hasse's 1960 story is a sharp AI-and-social-SF tale. Clever, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story of a man's uneasy, deepening entanglement with an intelligent machine he cannot bring himself to trust, in a well-turned golden-age piece about the creeping intimacy between humans and their computers, and where friendship with a machine might lead.

In its time

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

Reading it

1 hr 25 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).

Illustrated by

Mel Varga