Donald Colvin 22 min read

It takes sportsmanship to make a ball team, and foul play to civilize a backward race. The grinning, piebald Quxas keep wandering onto the diamond in all the wrong directions.

Donald Colvin's 1953 story mines genial comedy from Earthmen teaching baseball to the amiable aliens of a colony world. Fun, wry first-contact SF. Read it for a lighthearted tale where America's pastime becomes an unlikely tool of civilization on a very strange planet.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ernest Kurt Barth