Charles V. De Vet 13 min read

Aboard their ship, the alien explorers Macker and Remm study a captured biped native, a pallid creature in gaudy artificial skin, hunched on a packing-box, trying to grasp what it is.

Charles V. De Vet's 1959 story is a wry first-contact and hard-SF tale. Clever, ironic golden-age SF. Read it for a story told entirely from the aliens' baffled viewpoint as they examine a human being, finding us strange and pitiable, in a well-turned golden-age piece that flips first contact around to unsettling and comic effect.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Bob Martin