Robert Sheckley 30 min read

For millennia the leech drifted across empty space, a dry dead-seeming spore, until a planet claimed it, the winds let it fall, and on the ground it began to stir, and grow, and feed.

Robert Sheckley's 1952 story is a taut, escalating first-contact and horror tale. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a chilling story of an alien organism that consumes everything it touches, growing without limit, and the desperate, ingenious effort to destroy a thing that only gets stronger the more you attack it.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Connell