Keith Laumer 28 min read

Junior diplomat Jame Retief watches the pompous Terran mission blunder through the baffling etiquette of the Yill, and quietly sets about saving the negotiations they're busy wrecking.

Keith Laumer's 1962 story is a sharp, hilarious social-SF space opera, an early Retief tale. Witty, biting, delightful. Read it for the debut of Laumer's beloved wisecracking diplomat, a savage, funny satire of pompous bureaucracy, where competent Retief cleans up after his self-important superiors, in classic comic golden-age SF.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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