Katherine MacLean 29 min read

Pictures, the kind you can test and measure, positively cannot lie. As rain sleets across the airfield, the world waits for friendly aliens, very human-looking, to land at last.

Katherine MacLean's 1951 story is a superb, ironic first-contact tale built on the hard evidence of images. Sharp, ingenious, unforgettable golden-age SF. Read it for a classic story where incontrovertible photographic proof leads, with beautiful logic, to a devastating misunderstanding.

In its time

Published in 1951, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Martin Schneider