Jack Sharkey 20 min read

First contact is only dangerous to the man who makes it, as a landing on the jungle-world Viridian is about to demonstrate.

Jack Sharkey's 1962 story sets a spaceship down into a triangle of clearing amid the endless green of a 7,000-mile jungle planet, crewmen bursting out to beat back the fires of landing before the real business of meeting the natives begins. Brisk, vividly imagined magazine SF with a wry sense of contact's occupational hazards. Read it for atmospheric jungle-world adventure and Sharkey's reliable knack for a twist.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

George Schelling