the narrator skills for controlling matter with thought. Though it lies within the power of some advanced races to halt his shrinking or grant him release from life (for he finds he has become immortal), none will interfere. The narrator eventually finds his way down to a blue planet, where he is examined by scientists who underestimate his intelligence due to communication difficulties (he has become so accustomed to communicating by thought transference with more advanced races he has forgotten how to even attempt to speak vocally to leave some record for them, and they are too primitive to register his thoughts). He tires of them and escapes, making his way out of the city, subduing those who bar his way with waves of angry thought that render them unconscious. He makes his way to an isolated house outside the city, where a man is listening to a broadcast about the alien who touched down in Lake Erie, near Cleveland. He finds the individual has a more imaginative, receptive mind than the others encountered, and asks to dictate to the man his story. It is at this point revealed that the narrator is NOT an earthman, but from a world inconceivable level above us, and that he has reached our world. In the epilogue, the writer, a renowned writer of both "serious books" and "scores of short stories and books of the widely popular type of literature known as science fiction" gives a press interview announcing the publication of the story above for free, which he wrote in his own hand while under a voluntarily induced trance. He asserts that the story is true, but grants that it may be received by many as fiction. Reception Carl Sagan in 1978 wrote that the story "presents an entrancing cosmological speculation which is being seriously revived today". Notes The story makes reference to the then-recent proposal that the universe is expanding, based on the discovery that distant astronomic bodies appeared to be receding. The idea of a fractal universe, with atoms or subatomic particles of one scale corresponding to the stars of another scale, had been employed in other science fiction works, such as "Out of the Sub-Universe" (1928) by Roman Frederick Starzl. See also The Shrinking Man References Works originally published in Amazing Stories 1936 short stories Fiction about size change