Jesse F. Bone 13 min read

Digging a streamway on the metal-less world of Kwashior, an excavator strikes a mass of oxidized fragments where no metal should exist, the debris of something that fell long ago from elsewhere.

Jesse F. Bone's 1960 story is a clever colonization and first-contact tale framed as an alien archaeological report. Sharp, ingenious golden-age SF. Read it for a story where non-human scholars puzzle over strange metallic relics on their world, and the Issahar artifacts slowly reveal a poignant human story from long ago.

In its time

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

Reading it

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