Jr. L. J. Stecher 16 min read

The narrator is a little worried when Captain Hannah turns up again, he might want his elephants back, and the narrator has grown attached to them, even the baby that keeps nibbling Gasha leaves.

L. J. Stecher, Jr.'s 1963 story is a wry first-contact and social-SF comedy. Fun, clever golden-age SF. Read it for a genial tall-tale of interplanetary trade gone gloriously awry, mismatched alien deliveries, mistaken zoology, and a spacefaring con, in a light, good-humored golden-age piece brimming with the deadpan absurdity of the best comic SF.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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