Mel Hunter 15 min read

Fed up with his tidy titrations, Mr. Harbinger sets down his pencil and quietly invites his prissy supervisor to jam the whole neat lot straight up you-know-where.

Mel Hunter's 1954 story (by a noted SF cover artist) is a sparkling, erudite first-contact and social-SF tale. Sophisticated, witty golden-age SF. Read it for a polished story that opens on office rebellion and reaches, with sly intelligence, toward the deep questions of evolution and mankind.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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