Arthur W. Orton 28 min read

Ezekiel's strange vision of wheeled, four-faced beings, the narrator argues, was no mystical dream at all, but a plain description of something the prophet had no words to name.

Arthur W. Orton's 1961 story is a clever first-contact and social-SF tale of ancient astronauts. Sharp, ingenious golden-age SF. Read it for a story that reads the Book of Ezekiel as an eyewitness account of alien visitors, in an early and thoughtful take on a premise that would later become famous.

In its time

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

Reading it

28 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).