The Man Outside — Inside the Classic

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In Category - Space Future

Authors: Smith, Evelyn E., 1922-2000, Dillon, Diane, 1933- [Illustrator], Dillon, Leo, 1933-2012 [Illustrator] Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2016 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Science fiction; Short stories; Time travel -- Fiction Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 9,687

Reading time 43 min

Text sections 1

The Man Outside — Inside the Classic can be approached with a clearer sense of reading commitment from its source measurements: 9,687 words, 43 min estimated reading time, and 1 detected text section.

The text analysis averages about 16.1 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Science fiction,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #51337

Evelyn E. Smith's 1957 novella follows Martin, a boy guarded by time-traveling descendants who claim to protect him from a killer relative. The story contrasts his gritty present with the cousins' future, exploring boredom, purpose, and moral ambiguity through Martin's detached observations.

Editorial Edition Score 4.4/5

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Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg51337

Read the Text

She looked at him as if he were out of his mind.

"Hire a maid, then!" he jeered.

And darned if that dope didn't go out and get a woman to come clean up the place! He was so embarrassed, he didn't even dare show his face in the streets--especially with the women buttonholing him and demanding to know what gave. They tried talking to Ninian, but she certainly knew how to give them the cold shoulder.

One day the truant officer came to ask why Martin hadn't been coming to school. Very few of the neighborhood kids attended classes very regularly, so this was just routine. But Ninian didn't know that and she went into a real tizzy, babbling that Martin had been sick and would make up the work. Martin nearly did get sick from laughing so hard inside.

But he laughed out of the other side of his mouth when she went out and hired a private tutor for him. A tutor--in that neighborhood! Martin had to beat up every kid on the block before he could walk a step without hearing "Fancy Pants!" yelled after him.

Ninian worried all the time. It wasn't that she cared what these people thought of her, for she made no secret of regarding them as little better than animals, but she was shy of attracting attention. There were an awful lot of people in that neighborhood who felt exactly the same way, only she didn't know that, either. She was really pretty dumb, Martin thought, for all her fancy lingo.

"It's so hard to think these things out without any prior practical application to go by," she told him.

He nodded, knowing what she meant was that everything was coming out wrong. But he didn't try to help her; he just watched to see what she'd do next. Already he had begun to assume the detached role of a spectator.

When it became clear that his mother was never going to show up again, Ninian bought one of those smallish, almost identical houses that mushroom on the fringes of a city after every war, particularly where intensive bombing has created a number of desirable building sites.

"This is a much better neighborhood for a boy to grow up in," she declared. "Besides, it's easier to keep an eye on you here."

And keep an eye on him she did--she or a rather foppish young man who came to stay with them occasionally. Martin was told to call him Uncle Raymond.

From time to time, there were other visitors--Uncles Ives and Bartholomew and Olaf, Aunts Ottillie and Grania and Lalage, and many more--all cousins to one another, he was told, all descendants of his.

Martin was never left alone for a minute. He wasn't allowed to play with the other kids in the new neighborhood. Not that their parents would have let them, anyway. The adults obviously figured that if a one-car family hired private tutors for their kid, there must be something pretty wrong with him. So Martin and Ninian were just as conspicuous as before. But he didn't tip her off. She was grown up; she was supposed to know better than he did.

He lived well. He had food to eat that he'd never dreamed of before, warm clothes that no one had ever worn before him. He was surrounded by more luxury than he knew what to do with.

The furniture was the latest New Grand Rapids African modern. There were tidy, colorful Picasso and Braque prints on the walls. And every inch of the floor was modestly covered by carpeting, though the walls were mostly unabashed glass. There were hot water and heat all the time and a freezer well stocked with food--somewhat erratically chosen, for Ninian didn't know much about meals.

The non-glass part of the house was of neat, natural-toned wood, with a neat green lawn in front and a neat parti-colored garden in back.

Martin missed the old neighborhood, though. He missed having other kids to play with. He even missed his mother. Sure, she hadn't given him enough to eat and she'd beaten him up so hard sometimes that she'd nearly killed him--but then there had also been times when she'd hugged and kissed him and soaked his collar with her tears. She'd done all she could for him, supporting him in the only way she knew how--and if respectable society didn't like it, the hell with respectable society.

Continue Reading →

Evelyn E. Smith's The Man Outside opens with a blunt premise: Martin, an eleven-year-old in a scabrous tenement, is taken in by a woman who claims to be his great-great-granddaughter from the future. She says she must protect him from her cousin Conrad, who wants to kill him as part of an elaborate plan to change the social order. The neighborhood accepts the disappearance of Martin's mother without surprise—mothers 'had a way of disappearing around those parts.'

This matter-of-fact tone, filtered through Martin's streetwise skepticism, establishes a tension between the mundane and the extraordinary. He dismisses Ninian's story as 'just a gag,' yet the narrative never confirms or denies her claims, leaving the reader to weigh the evidence alongside Martin.

A Boy's-Eye View of the Future

Martin's voice drives the story. He is pragmatic, irreverent, and accustomed to neglect. When Ninian complains about the dirty apartment, he suggests she clean it herself; when she hires a maid, he is mortified by the neighborhood's reaction. His dialogue is peppered with slang like 'straight gas' and 'ain't done him nothing,' grounding the fantastical premise in a recognizable, gritty reality.

The cousins from the future, by contrast, speak in a more formal register and seem baffled by Martin's world. They are 'all young' and 'did not trust their elders,' suggesting a generational schism within their own timeline. Yet their behavior—hiring maids, crying when provoked, showing 'overwhelming black' at funerals—often feels as childish as Martin's. The story uses this mismatch to create humor and unease.

Martin's limited perspective means the reader never learns the full mechanics of time travel or Conrad's plan. The cousins' explanations are vague: 'When you get older, someone will explain the whole thing to you.' This withholding keeps the focus on Martin's immediate experience rather than the plot's logic.

The Weight of Waiting

After Conrad fails to appear, the story shifts from threat to monotony. Martin and his rotating guardians sail the world on the yacht Interregnum, visiting oceans that are 'some blue and some green and some dun.' He loses interest in the land, spending most of his time watching the sea and painting seascapes that have 'a depth to his other work lacked.'

The cousins come and go, each indistinguishable from the last. Martin begins to feel 'immeasurably bored,' and even the purchase of two of his paintings in Italy fails to provide purpose. One cousin advises him to 'eat, drink and be merry,' but Martin finds that 'neither purpose nor malice was enough.'

This section highlights the story's central tension: the protective mission, meant to preserve Martin's life, instead traps him in a passive, aimless existence. The future's intervention paradoxically robs his present of meaning.

Moral Ambiguity and the Cousins' Plan

Ives, one of the cousins, articulates the story's moral complexity. He admits he is 'not altogether sure Conrad was wrong' in trying to prevent humanity from reaching the stars and harming others. Yet Ives could not 'stand by and see my own way of life destroyed.' He hopes for 'a better way out than Conrad's' but speaks 'without conviction.'

Martin, listening, 'couldn't hope; he couldn't feel; he couldn't even seem to care.' This emotional numbness recurs throughout the excerpts. When Ives dies of a chill, Raymond eulogizes that 'he died for all of us, so his death was not in vain,' but Martin disagrees silently.

The cousins' plan is never fully explained, but its effects are clear: it creates a cycle of protection, boredom, and loss. The story resists easy judgments, leaving readers to question whether Conrad's radicalism or the cousins' preservation is more defensible—and whether Martin's life is worth saving at such a cost.

The Man Outside rewards attention to its small details: the way Martin's paintings gain depth as his life loses purpose, the cousins' interchangeable names and behaviors, the offhand references to a war-ravaged past. Smith builds a world where time travel is less a marvel than a burden, and where the line between protector and captor blurs. Readers should watch for how Martin's detachment evolves—and what, if anything, finally breaks it.

Reading about Martin’s hollow boredom, how oddly thin his guarded future felt, I kept circling back to a quieter handbook I’d once shelved nearby. The cousins’ sterile purpose reminded me of how What is POSAT? — Context and Discussion untangles meaning from routine. Strange, the books we pair by feeling, not by plot. I still think of that grey afternoon, both volumes side by side.