R. A. Lafferty 15 min read

Their instruments detect life, spinal fluid in rivers, even Thought, but only from one tiny walled spot on the whole little moon, as though there were but a single city there.

R. A. Lafferty's 1961 story spins a wry, allusive first-contact and colonization tale from an alien survey of a strange world. Clever, inimitable golden-age SF. Read it for a characteristically sly Lafferty story where explorers puzzle over a single point of thought in a garden of a moon.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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