Willis Knapp Jones 23 min read

Eighteen years after finding Henry Sanborn dead beneath his laboratory window, the narrator lands with him near the village where Henry was born, to settle whether Henry's kind may contact Earth.

Willis Knapp Jones's 1937 story is an atmospheric space-opera and horror tale of an alien return and a fateful decision. Vivid, eerie period pulp. Read it for a strange story of a man come back from another world, and the judgment that will decide humanity's contact with his kind.

In its time

Published in 1937, during the 1930s, space opera soars.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Margaret Brundage