Jim Harmon 22 min read

The natives come in two shades of blue, light and dark, but not, the pilot notes, as blue as the Earthmen feel.

Jim Harmon's 1960 story follows a wry space pilot and two scientists observing a planet's blue-skinned inhabitants and their sedan-chair elite, puzzling out an alien social order. Light, comic first-contact SF with a likable narrator. Read it for genial golden-age SF about reading the etiquette of a very colorful new world.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Wallace Wood