Roger D. Aycock 24 min read

As a Ciriimian trading ship slips through hyperdrive, the ravening Canthorian Zid breaks free in the specimen hold and devours two of the crew before they can even wake.

Roger D. Aycock's (Roger Dee's) 1958 story is a taut first-contact space opera. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a suspenseful story of telepathic alien traders facing a lethal beast loose aboard their own ship, told largely from a genuinely non-human viewpoint, in an inventive golden-age piece rich with strange perspective and mounting danger.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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