Judith Merril 17 min read

Herewith, a top-secret transcript picked up at Pluto Station's Project Ozma, an alien broadcast whose content, an anthropologist warns his chairman, concerns humanity directly.

Judith Merril's 1963 story is a sharp, poignant social-SF and space-opera tale told through documents. Clever, humane golden-age SF. Read it for a story where scientists monitoring the stars intercept a transmission that speaks, unexpectedly, to the deepest human loneliness, in a fine tale from a master of the field.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay