William Campbell Gault 36 min read

That's what we always called them, huddlers, the damnedest thing to see from a distance, encrusting the shore eight million at a time in a place they called New York, living one above another.

William Campbell Gault's 1953 story is a wry first-contact and social-SF satire told from an alien's view. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a sharp, comic outsider's-eye look at human crowding and cities, as puzzled aliens try to fathom why the creatures of Earth insist on huddling together.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ernest Kurt Barth