Jack Williamson 6 min read

The planet wore a mask: a sullen yellow eye at ten million miles, a scarred leer at one million, and up close a hideous veil of hairy black tentacles hiding the riddle of its sinister genes.

Jack Williamson's 1963 story is a vivid, imaginative first-contact space opera. Sharp, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a story where astronauts land on a world whose very biology is alien to the last gene, and must penetrate the deadly, deceptive mask that the masked world wears against all intruders.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay