Robert Sheckley 27 min read

They could eat a horse, luckily there was none, or it might have eaten them first. Two starving men aboard a ship, down to a single radish, approach a red dwarf and its one planet.

Robert Sheckley's 1953 story is a sharp, funny first-contact and social-SF tale of alien food and survival. Clever, wry golden-age SF from a master. Read it for a witty story where two hungry spacemen discover that on a strange world, one man's meat may very well be another's poison.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller