Evelyn E. Smith 23 min read

Lying on a shelf-bunk aboard a starliner, Michael watches an ad turn a haggard blonde into a clog-dancer, and the passenger beside him asks, from his hair, which Brotherhood he belonged to.

Evelyn E. Smith's 1952 story is a witty social-SF space opera about the perils of alien etiquette. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial comedy of manners among the stars, where a traveler's ignorance of a strange world's customs lands him in escalating, delightful trouble.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

William Ashman