Damon Knight 30 min read

Marooned and half-drunk on a stinking blue-green Venus, spaceman Shoemaker curses the day he ever agreed to old Davies's crazy plans, as three little green men make everything worse.

Damon Knight's 1948 story is a wry first-contact and social-SF comedy. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for an early Knight tale of a grumbling, hard-drinking castaway and the aliens who complicate his misery, in a genial, ironic yarn that pokes gentle fun at the whole business of meeting little green men.

In its time

Published in 1948, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Al McWilliams