Evelyn Goldstein 11 min read

From behind the curtains of his trim white cottage, Jim Simson peers out at his sunlit garden with caution and longing, a creature not quite human, hiding from a world that would not understand him.

Evelyn Goldstein's 1954 story is a tender, poetic first-contact and social-SF tale. Poignant, lyrical, affecting. Read it for a heartbreaking story of the not-quite-human and the loneliness of difference, told with a compassion and high poetry that its editors thought only a woman could bring, in a quietly moving golden-age gem.

In its time

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

Reading it

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