Robert Silverberg 35 min read

Collecting specimens for the interstellar zoo is easy, aliens battle for the honor, but one exhibitionist creature is out to make a monkey of the collector.

Robert Silverberg's 1958 story follows the harried Corrigan and his staff as bizarre life-forms queue for hundreds of feet to join his galactic menagerie, one of them scheming behind its eagerness. Fast, funny space opera with a showman's flair. Read it for breezy, inventive golden-age SF about the business of bottling wonders.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

35 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Wallace Wood