Robert W. Lowndes 6 min read

'You say you saw three Martian ships, Corelli, can you describe them?' Dr. Clayton asks, marble-faced, as the young man squirms under his colleagues' boring stares in the quiet classroom.

Robert W. Lowndes's 1959 story is a sharp first-contact and social-SF tale. Clever, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a scoffed-at report of unearthly ships opens onto something stranger than saucers, and the fourth invasion of the title proves nothing like the ones that came before.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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