Byron Tustin 26 min read

The rocket crashes into the hillside, and Archie Simms jumps out to face the welcoming committee: a motionless purple sphere, eight feet across, with two huge, sad eyes watching the wrecked ship.

Byron Tustin's 1954 story is a wry, comic first-contact space opera. Fun, genial golden-age SF. Read it for a good-humored tale where stranded spacemen confront a mournful purple alien they can't shoo away, and the purple pariah of the title proves more, and more endearing, than it first appears.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas