Berkeley Livingston 17 min read

A science-fiction writer and artist despair over the bug-eyed monsters ruining their genre, and, elsewhere, a genuine B.E.M. groans about how much it hates humans.

Berkeley Livingston's 1948 story turns the pulp cliché of the tentacled alien into cheerful metafictional comedy of first contact. Light, funny, self-aware golden-age SF. Read it for a genial gag about the very monsters science fiction loved to hate.

In its time

Published in 1948, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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