Jerome Bixby 34 min read

'They're landing, Master,' thinks the many-eyed alien scientist Pud, glowering up at the human spaceship dropping toward the isolated system that has always been his private laboratory.

Jerome Bixby's 1955 story spins a wry first-contact and hard-SF tale from an alien researcher's point of view. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a story that turns Earthly explorers into the specimens, watched by a testy scientist whose experiment they're about to disturb.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

34 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller