Friday, August 28, 2009

Henry Kuttner & C L Moore's "Three Blind Mice" (as by Lewis Padgett) (novelette, racism, free): Racist organization needs to be nipped in the bud

Quote from short story titled Three Blind Mice by Henry Kuttner and C L Moore, under the pseudonym Lewis PadgettFor background, see "Mutant" page.

Radiation-induced mutations after "Blowout" had added 3 minority classes of hairless telepathic humans ("Baldies") to majority normals - "mad, sane, sane-paranoid":

  1. mad pose no threat to anyone & are an institutional case
  2. sane can live in normal society if they are careful not to take undue advantage of their telepathic abilities vis-a-vis normals, &
  3. paranoids who think they're homo superior & would rather live in a world without normal homo sapiens.
David Barton - a sane Baldy & a trained hunter - must destroy the infant gang of 3 "paranoids" who have discovered a telepathic communications band invisible to other Baldies & using which they intend to raise an organization whose aim is to purge the world of normals.

Collected in.

  1. Henry Kuttner & C L Moore's "Mutant" (collection).

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding, June 1945.
Rating: B.
Read full text at WOWIO as part of Mutant collection (no download) (needs a lot of clicks to reach the story text).
This is the second story of authors' Baldy series.
Related: Stories of Henry Kuttner, C L Moore (as by Lewis Padgett).
Listed among the stories from John Campbell's Astounding/Analog.

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