L. Major Reynolds 5 min read

Henderson's lovely engineered flowers are going to bring him fame, until they walk and talk too much, extending a tiny green limb across his laboratory table with great and deliberate effort.

L. Major Reynolds's 1953 story is a light, comic first-contact and social-SF tale of an inventor's creation getting out of hand. Fun, genial golden-age SF. Read it for a droll story where a scientist's marvelous talking plants prove rather more talkative, and troublesome, than he ever intended.

In its time

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

Reading it

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