Philip José Farmer 9 min read

The polaroid glasses handed out at the 3-D movies are the cause of the gate-crasher narrator's downfall, the wry opening of a barbed little tale by the author of The Lovers.

Philip José Farmer's 1954 story is a witty first-contact and social-SF tale. Sharp, ironic, entertaining. Read it for early Farmer with his fancy's 'irony-tipped talons', a clever, barbed story where an incorrigible party-crasher's peculiar gift leads him somewhere he never expected, in a bright, inventive golden-age piece from a bold new talent.

In its time

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

Reading it

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