Randall Garrett 17 min read

A fearsome thing is simply a thing you fear, no matter whether others fear it or whether it's truly dangerous, and it's your view that counts, in a tale that plunges into a mind coming apart.

Randall Garrett's 1960 story is a clever first-contact and social-SF tale. Sharp, disorienting golden-age SF. Read it for an inventive story built on the psychology of fear and perception, told partly from inside a mind reeling in darkness, where what seems monstrous depends entirely on point of view, in a well-turned golden-age piece with a neat conceptual twist.

In its time

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

Reading it

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