Philip José Farmer 22 min read

'Call me Zeus,' says the Director, glaring through hexagonal dark glasses at the blue sea and black ships below Troy, for to the savages of this planet, his power over them makes him a god.

Philip José Farmer's 1960 story wryly reimagines the gods of the Iliad as callous alien overseers. Sharp, irreverent social SF from a master. Read it for a clever tale that recasts the Trojan War's divine meddlers as very unheroic managers of a primitive world.

In its time

Published in 1960, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay