Stanley Mullen 44 min read

Wherever men gather, someone mentions Khaljean's on Venus, zoo, petshop, and wild-animal supply house, rumored to fabricate any nightmarish monster you could name, to order.

Stanley Mullen's 1953 story spins a colorful first-contact and colonization tale from the most legendary establishment in the solar system. Vivid, imaginative golden-age SF. Read it for a story built around a place that stagger the imagination, where the strange and fantastic are simply the stock in trade.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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