Winston K. Marks 20 min read

A vast star-drinking being pauses a light-year off course to gorge itself on a tempting little yellow sun, barely noticing, at first, the bevy of clumsy little spaceships swarming its third planet.

Winston K. Marks's 1954 story is a wry, imaginative first-contact tale. Clever, fun golden-age SF. Read it for a delightful cosmic-scale story told partly from the viewpoint of an almost godlike alien, whose idle curiosity about humanity's little ships makes for a witty, perspective-flipping golden-age encounter.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

W. E. Terry