Algis Budrys 11 min read

'Unfortunate castaway! Marooned far from home, with nothing to share his loneliness but humans!' Two beings called Maurer and Charpantier walk up the hill, and one remarks the Veld isn't sane anymore.

Algis Budrys's 1962 story is a subtle, unsettling first-contact and social-SF tale. Sharp, strange golden-age SF. Read it for an eerie, oblique story of aliens hidden among humanity, told through a mind that struggles to grasp its own nature, in a haunting meditation on loneliness and identity.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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