Joseph Farrell 20 min read

'Is it time?' Jarth Rolan asks anxiously, jumpier than a human, as Pilot Lan Barda holds their craft at the permitted limit of Earth's upper atmosphere, waiting for the signal to descend.

Joseph Farrell's 1958 story is a wry first-contact and social-SF tale of galactic observers. Clever, genial golden-age SF. Read it for a story where hairless, pink-skinned galactics hover above a war-torn Earth, weighing when and whether to intervene, in a gently ironic take on the ethics of contact.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Johnson