Max Williams 4 min read

It took the narrator less than three thousand years to catch up with Pop, the old fool breathing foul methane as if it were health gas, sheepish at having caused such trouble.

Max Williams's 1961 story is a wry, inventive first-contact and social-SF tale. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story of near-immortal, methane-breathing beings and a father-and-child chase across the ages and the galaxy, told with dry humor and a fresh alien perspective.

In its time

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

Reading it

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