Lewis Parker 24 min read

'City morgue,' the narrator answers his ringing phone, a lady from down the hall beside him, and stammering Willy on the line is about to make the evening anything but normal.

Lewis Parker's 1953 story is a breezy, comic first-contact and social-SF tale. Fun, wry golden-age SF. Read it for a genial screwball yarn where a bachelor's pleasant evening is upended by a friend's frantic call, and a most unusual pinup that proves to have a life of its own.

In its time

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

Reading it

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