Keith Laumer 10 min read

A gentle alien lands on the courthouse lawn in friendship, in exactly the wrong small town.

Keith Laumer's savage 1964 comedy opens with Judge Carter Gates watching a turquoise flower-ship settle among the petunias and a violet caterpillar-being emerge, plainly intelligent and peaceable. What follows is Laumer at his most acidly funny, skewering the reflexive human response to anything that looks different. Brisk, black, and pointed, it wrings real satire from a first-contact setup gone wrong. Read it for a stinging little parable about xenophobia, told with a grin and a knife.

In its time

Published in 1964, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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