Robert Shea 23 min read

Blue Boy's rating is high and his fans are loyal to the death, anyone's death. Gavir fits the silvery globe over his hairless blue skull, the first native Martian to appear on the dreamwaves.

Robert Shea's 1960 story is a sharp AI-and-social-SF satire of mass entertainment. Clever, biting golden-age SF (by the future co-author of 'Illuminatus!'). Read it for a pointed story where a shy Martian becomes a broadcast sensation, and the audience's hunger for spectacle takes an ominous turn.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Dick Francis