Edgar Pangborn 9 min read

A spherical ship twenty-seven miles across settles into Earth orbit, occasioning mild excitement at the tail end of the 20th century, until the day Seattle suffers a shadow that is not an eclipse.

Edgar Pangborn's 1960 story is a warm, humane first-contact and social-SF tale. Sharp, gentle, thoughtful golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a jaded, distracted humanity barely notices its visitors, and the good neighbors of the title regard us with a patience and kindness we scarcely deserve.

In its time

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

Reading it

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