Thursday, January 8, 2009

On "Flight from Tomorrow" by H. Beam Piper (8154 words) ***

A deposed dictator gets away--in a time machine. He'll be back (in Arnold's words)! He's coming back to reap revenge. But there's a problem. The time machine takes him back further than he intended--and then it stops working. So here he is, stuck, in the 1950s. Easy enough, one would figure, for a person with a lot of two-thousand-years-in-future tech savvy to take advantage of virtually anyone. (Though I keep thinking I'd know even less than most people in the 1750s knew about day-to-day getting along. I may know how to use some tech things, but I don't know how to make them!) However, for our dictator, there's a slight problem: all living things in the place where he landed appear to be suffering from disease. Will he succumb and die too? Read the story here at Project Gutenberg, or listen to it here at Project Gutenberg Audio.

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