Daniel F. Galouye 22 min read

As the dust drifts clear of the landing skids, two things become obvious: they've missed the city by miles, and the landscape will be crawling with escaped Zaortian Fuzzy Tails for a long while.

Daniel F. Galouye's 1961 story is a wry first-contact and social-SF tale of a baffling civilization. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story where a downed crew, ten thousand credits of alien cargo scattering into the countryside, tries to make sense of a world that stubbornly refuses to make sense.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Harrington