Alan Arkin 8 min read

A boarding-house couple ship the hapless Jack Gretch home to his father, owing two weeks' rent and reduced to some strange 'condition', after his home physics experiment went disastrously wrong.

Alan Arkin's 1955 story (yes, the actor) is a wry, zany hard-SF and social-SF comedy. Fun, clever golden-age SF. Read it for a genial madcap yarn of a backyard scientist whose amateur physics experiment produces catastrophic and comical results, in a light, well-turned golden-age piece, an early work by the celebrated actor, brimming with good-humored absurdity.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Diehl