James Stamers 17 min read

He is in some dark, moving medium, unable to feel his hands, only an itch in his calf; he thrusts down to relieve it and, surprisingly, rises up. He is, it seems, still alive.

James Stamers's 1960 story is an inventive first-contact and social-SF tale of a strange transformation. Clever, imaginative golden-age SF. Read it for a disorienting story where men who were human wake to a remarkable new destiny on an incredible planet, their old bodies and old lives left far behind.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Carter