Allen Kim Lang 6 min read

A man at a bar, annoyed by a big-eared neighbor blocking the TV, gets drawn into a rant about a commercial that's an 'insult and an outrage.'

Allen Kim Lang's 1958 story mines wry comedy from advertising and gullibility, its narrator studying an elf-and-golf-balls commercial as his neighbor fumes. Light, satirical first-contact SF with a needling edge. Read it for genial golden-age SF that skewers the hard sell and the credulous consumer.

In its time

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

Reading it

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