Fritz Leiber 10 min read

Earth's first visitor from another planet, freshly landed and eager to meet a cultural anthropologist, grows anxious and asks the baffled Professor a simple, urgent question: 'Please, where is it?'

Fritz Leiber's 1957 story is a wry first-contact comedy. Fun, clever golden-age SF. Read it for a genial Leiber gag-story where humanity's momentous first contact with a Martian turns on a small, hilariously human misunderstanding, in a light, well-turned golden-age piece that finds comedy in the gap between two very different creatures' most basic assumptions.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Bowman