Winston K. Marks 16 min read

A galactic investigator files an urgent report: an obscure nine-planet system holds an explosive potential, for the crystalline carbon he chartered has developed a most alarming trait.

Winston K. Marks's 1954 story is a wry first-contact and hard-SF tale told as a bureaucratic memo. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story where a cosmic official reports on the dangerous emergence of a carbon-based life-form on a minor world, in a droll outsider's-eye view of humanity as a regulatory problem.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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