Roger Kuykendall 7 min read

We only borrowed a couple of things, honest, like the compressor, because everybody knows you've got to have a compressor on a spaceship, insists a boy explaining how the kids built one.

Roger Kuykendall's 1959 story is a charming first-contact and social-SF tale. Warm, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a delightful story told in the guileless voice of a kid whose gang, led by the 'boy genius' Skinny, cobbles together a working spaceship out of borrowed junk, in a genial, good-humored golden-age piece brimming with youthful ingenuity and innocence.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas