Kevin Scott 6 min read

'You ain't gonna like it here,' the departing man warns, but the fastidious alien Groverzb, who loathes conversation, has come to this planet of silent, three-foot natives precisely for the quiet.

Kevin Scott's 1961 story spins a wry first-contact and social-SF comedy from an alien who craves solitude. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story where a peace-and-quiet-seeking extraterrestrial settles on a world of wordless natives, only to find silence is not so easily kept.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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