George Henry Weiss 39 min read

From the mouth of an abandoned mine shaft in the Catalinas emerges a queer metallic bird with golden eyes and a flat, reptilian head, a species mining engineer Talbot has never seen.

George Henry Weiss's 1932 story is a vivid first-contact and hard-SF tale of a strange invasion. Sharp, imaginative golden-age pulp. Read it for a colorful pulp yarn where uncanny metallic birds emerge from the desert earth, and their eerie origin points to a menace stranger than any natural creature.

In its time

Published in 1932, during the 1930s, space opera soars.

Reading it

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