Laurence M. Janifer 12 min read

Don't take your eye off music, there's going to be a lot more to it than meets the ear, from the four-dimensional polyphony of Green III to censored racial 'music' best left undescribed.

Laurence M. Janifer's 1959 story is a witty mock-anthology of galactic musicology, imagining the wild forms music takes across alien worlds. Clever, playful social space opera. Read it for an inventive tour of the universe's strangest sounds, straight from a future reference book.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Don Martin