Charles Schafhauser 22 min read

A flophouse manager writes a worried letter to the editor after two guests vanish, leaving only their empty suits behind.

Charles Schafhauser's 1953 story is narrated in the aggrieved, ungrammatical voice of hotelier Ivan Smernda, whose missing 'stew bum' tenants turn out to be at the center of an invasion from a not-world of not-questions. A genuinely funny epistolary comedy of alien infiltration seen from the bottom of the social ladder. Read it for offbeat, deadpan 1950s SF told by exactly the wrong narrator.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller