Raymond Z. Gallun 47 min read

Most monsters, it's a funny thing, think it's men who are the monsters, and they have a point. Ten minutes after the crackup, somebody phoned for the Army, which meant us.

Raymond Z. Gallun's 1953 story is a thoughtful, humane first-contact and hard-SF tale of a crashed alien. Sharp, sympathetic golden-age SF. Read it for a story where the wreckage of an alien ship yields a survivor, and the men who study it must reckon with which side, really, is the monster.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Sandy Kossin