Willard Marsh 8 min read

The missionaries came out of a star they called The Sun, from a world they called Earth, calling themselves human beings, soul-savers cruising the galaxy in search of some emergent cousin to redeem.

Willard Marsh's 1955 story is a wry, ironic first-contact and social-SF satire. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a sharp story that flips the missionary premise, alien evangelists scouring the stars for lesser beings to save, with a pointed twist about who is really redeeming whom.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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