Algis Budrys 15 min read

Sunset. 'They're coming for me tonight,' he knows as he wakes, though he can walk in daylight, his tan proves it, and the old wives' tales can't all be true. Can they?

Algis Budrys's 1958 story builds creeping first-contact horror around a man who may, or may not, be exactly what the legends describe. Sharp, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a taut tale that plays a modern, science-fictional variation on an ancient and dreadful theme.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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