Jack Sharkey 22 min read

On September 24, 1965, a Venusian spaceship settles gently onto the asphalt of Times Square, and an oppressive, unnatural silence falls over the hushed, waiting streets of New York.

Jack Sharkey's 1960 story is an atmospheric colonization and first-contact tale. Sharp, eerie golden-age SF. Read it for a story that opens on a vivid, unsettling first-contact tableau in the heart of Manhattan, building quiet dread toward a revelation, in a well-turned golden-age piece about the strange gulf between humans and the visitors from another world.

In its time

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

Reading it

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