Henry Slesar 54 min read

A giant projector throws movie star Monica Mitchell's thousand-foot face across the sky, eyes the size of dirigibles, lashes curling a hundred feet, over a city below.

Henry Slesar's 1957 story spins a wry first-contact and social-SF tale from advertising run gloriously, alarmingly amok. Sharp, satirical golden-age SF. Read it for a story that fills the heavens with a colossal projected starlet, and asks what happens when the sky itself becomes a billboard.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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