Jack Sharkey 14 min read

With no awareness of time, it drew silicates from the grey soil into the thousand green pods of its body and settled down to wait, a plant-thing whose heart beats once a century.

Jack Sharkey's 1960 story is an atmospheric, patient first-contact and social-SF tale of an ancient, slow alien life. Evocative, thoughtful golden-age SF. Read it for a story that unfolds across millennia, following a strange vegetable intelligence toward a long-awaited reunion.

In its time

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

Reading it

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