Roger D. Aycock 9 min read

A Martian-Terran romance has to buck tradition, on Mars, when they sing 'if you were the only girl in the world,' they mean it, and Mars' first ambassador finds Earth even worse than feared.

Roger D. Aycock's 1962 story mines warm comedy from an alien diplomat's culture shock and long-distance love. Charming, funny first-contact SF. Read it for a genial tale of an earnest Martian abroad, homesick for his fiancée and baffled by the bustle of Earth.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Leo Summers