Lawrence F. Willard 12 min read

Cautious Commander Losure brings his ship in behind a moon, out of sight of the prying telescopes on the inviting green planet below, his crew still shaken from a costly brush with high-I.Q. aliens.

Lawrence F. Willard's 1958 story is a wry first-contact and social-SF tale of wary alien scouts sizing up Earth. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a story told from the invaders' cautious point of view, where underestimating the natives has already proven fatal.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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