R. A. Lafferty 16 min read

On Pudibundia the people are exquisitely polite, so polite that none may ever gaze directly on another, and each must carry seven kinds of eyeglasses to look upon strangers, friends, and kin.

R. A. Lafferty's 1961 story is a wry, inventive first-contact and social-SF tale. Clever, funny, wonderfully Lafferty. Read it for a genial fable of a world whose extreme courtesy hides a sharp point, as a visitor to the polite people of Pudibundia discovers the strange and unsettling logic beneath their manners.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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