Jesse F. Bone 37 min read

A chubby commercial traveler, subjected to endless checks and a thirty-day quarantine, complains to the visiting Consul General, for these natives are astonishingly tough on visitors.

Jesse F. Bone's 1960 story is a wry colonization and social-SF tale. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story where a salesman's frustration with an alien world's obsessive precautions opens onto a surprising truth, in a light, well-turned golden-age piece, with a nod to oysters, about contamination, caution, and unintended consequences.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Wallace Wood