William R. Doede 27 min read

Stinson lies still in the sand of a Centaurian world, gloating over his instantaneous arrival, until a gray funnel-cloud of dust rises where there is scarcely wind enough to stir his hair.

William R. Doede's 1961 story is a vivid colonization and first-contact tale. Sharp, imaginative golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a man teleported to a distant world meets a powerful, lonely sand-thing that may or may not be a god, and confronts what godhood, on any world, really means.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Larry Ivie