Laurence M. Janifer 12 min read

Perhaps it was just as well I didn't tell them what I was. When the big men in the bar spat and called him 'Mex kid,' something in him saw red, and something more than temper began to stir.

Laurence M. Janifer's 1962 story fuses a sharp story of prejudice with a first-contact and social-SF twist. Pointed, surprising golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a slur hurled at a proud young man opens onto a secret far larger than any bigot suspects.

In its time

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

Reading it

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