Introduction

There is a particular kind of pleasure that comes from rediscovering a writer who once delighted readers in the golden age of science fiction magazines, only to slip quietly from the shelves of memory while the genre roared on without her. Evelyn E. Smith is precisely such a writer—a sly, witty, and unmistakably original voice whose stories crackled with the kind of intelligence and humor that too often went unappreciated in an era obsessed with rockets, robots, and ray guns. To open one of her tales is to step into a world where the absurdities of the cosmos are met not with grim seriousness but with a raised eyebrow and a quiet chuckle, where the strangeness of the universe becomes an occasion for comedy rather than catastrophe. This book, presented here in a fresh modern translation adapted for the contemporary reader, offers exactly that experience: a galactic escapade sparked by something as deceptively simple as a peculiar object, an item whose value and meaning unravel in directions no one could possibly predict.

What you hold in your hands is more than a single story; it is an invitation to remember a way of writing science fiction that prized wit over spectacle, character over hardware, and the gentle skewering of human folly over the manufactured drama of intergalactic war. Smith belonged to a generation of writers who understood that the most interesting territory in speculative fiction was not the distant planet or the alien biology, but the strange and contradictory creature who insists on dragging its habits, vanities, and obsessions across the stars. Her work asks us to laugh at ourselves, and in doing so, it asks us to see ourselves more clearly. That is no small accomplishment, and it is one of the reasons her stories repay attention even now, decades after they first appeared.

The Voice and the World of Evelyn E. Smith

Evelyn E. Smith came to prominence during the 1950s, a decade that has come to be regarded as one of the most fertile periods in the history of science fiction. The magazines of the era—the digest-sized publications that crowded newsstands and arrived in mailboxes with thrilling regularity—were hungry for short fiction, and they provided a platform for an extraordinary diversity of voices. It was a time when a clever idea, executed with style, could find an audience of hundreds of thousands of readers, and when a writer with a distinctive sensibility could carve out a place in the imaginations of devoted fans. Smith was one of those writers, and her contributions stood out precisely because they refused to take themselves too seriously.

Where many of her contemporaries leaned toward the portentous and the apocalyptic—toward stories of doom, conquest, and the cold indifference of the universe—Smith brought a lighter touch, a comic sensibility that was rare and rarer still in being genuinely funny rather than merely whimsical. Her humor was not the broad slapstick of pratfalls and exploding gadgets, though there is plenty of inventive nonsense to enjoy. It was a humor of observation, of irony, of the delicious gap between what people believe themselves to be and what they actually are. She had an ear for the way human beings rationalize their desires, and an eye for the social comedy that emerges when ordinary expectations collide with extraordinary circumstances. Reading her, one is reminded of the satirists who came before the rise of the genre—the writers who understood that the fantastic is most powerful when it holds up a mirror to the familiar.

It is worth pausing to appreciate just how difficult it is to write comic science fiction well. The genre depends, after all, on a certain suspension of disbelief, an agreement between writer and reader that the impossible will be treated as possible. Comedy threatens that agreement; the moment a writer winks too broadly at the reader, the fictional dream collapses, and the wonder evaporates. Smith managed the rare feat of writing fiction that is both genuinely speculative and genuinely funny—stories in which the laughter never undercuts the imaginative seriousness, and the imagination never weighs down the comedy. She achieves this balance through a kind of deadpan commitment: her characters take their absurd situations entirely seriously, and it is precisely their seriousness that produces the comedy. The universe she describes operates according to its own internal logic, and that logic, however bizarre, is followed with rigorous consistency. The result is a fictional world that feels both ridiculous and real, a world we can believe in even as we laugh at it.

Beyond her comic gifts, Smith was a writer of considerable craft. Her prose is economical and precise, never wasting a word, building each scene with the efficiency that the magazine market demanded but also with an elegance that transcends mere efficiency. She had a gift for the telling detail, the small observation that suddenly illuminates a character or a culture. And she had, perhaps most importantly, a deep and abiding interest in the question of value—in what people prize, why they prize it, and how the things we treasure reveal who we truly are. This preoccupation runs through much of her work, and it gives even her lightest stories a substratum of genuine thought. Beneath the laughter, there is always a question being asked, and the question is rarely a comfortable one.

This particular tale exemplifies all of these qualities. It begins, as the title suggests, with a curiosity—an object that draws attention, that provokes desire, that sets events in motion. From this small seed grows an adventure that ranges across the galaxy, an escapade that is at once a comedy of manners, a satire of consumer culture and connoisseurship, and a thoughtful meditation on the strange relationship between human beings and the things they collect. Smith uses the conventions of the space adventure—the journeys, the encounters with the unfamiliar, the complications that pile up with delightful inevitability—as a vehicle for exploring ideas that are far more enduring than the conventions themselves. The pleasures of the surface, the chase and the comedy and the surprise, are real and substantial. But beneath them lies something more, and the attentive reader will find much to ponder long after the final page.

A Note on This Modern Translation and the Art of Adaptation

This edition presents Smith’s work as a modern translation adapted for the contemporary reader, and a word about what that means—and what it does not mean—will help you approach the book with the right expectations. The fiction of the mid-twentieth century, for all its enduring delights, was written for an audience that no longer exists. The conventions of language, the assumptions about technology, the rhythms of reading, and even the cultural references that once flowed naturally between writer and reader have shifted over the intervening decades. A story that felt fresh and immediate to a reader in the 1950s may, to a reader today, contain small frictions—turns of phrase that have grown unfamiliar, idioms that have faded, references that have lost their resonance. The work of adaptation is the work of smoothing those frictions without sacrificing the essential character of the original.

The goal of a modern translation of this kind is not to rewrite the author or to impose a contemporary sensibility upon a work that belongs to another time. It is, rather, to remove the incidental obstacles that stand between the reader and the experience the author intended to create. Where a sentence has grown cumbersome through the simple passage of time, it has been gently clarified. Where a reference would now puzzle rather than illuminate, it has been handled with care so that its meaning remains accessible. The aim throughout has been fidelity to the spirit of the work—to its humor, its intelligence, its particular way of seeing—rather than slavish reproduction of every period detail. The reader who comes to this edition should feel that they are reading a living story, one that speaks to them directly, rather than a museum piece to be admired from behind glass.

This approach reflects a particular philosophy about the relationship between classic literature and contemporary readers. There is a school of thought that holds that older works should be presented exactly as they were written, with all their archaisms intact, as a kind of historical document. There is merit to this view, and for the scholar or the dedicated enthusiast, unaltered original texts will always have their place. But there is another school of thought, the one to which this edition belongs, which holds that the primary purpose of a story is to be read and enjoyed—that a story locked away in the amber of its original language risks losing the very audience that gives it life. By offering a careful, respectful adaptation, this edition seeks to extend the life of the work, to introduce it to readers who might otherwise pass it by, and to ensure that Smith’s wit and imagination continue to find an audience in an age very different from the one in which she wrote.

It should be said, too, that comedy is especially vulnerable to the erosion of time. A joke depends on timing, on shared understanding, on the precise calibration of expectation and surprise. When the language in which a joke is told grows unfamiliar, the joke can fall flat through no fault of its own—the humor is there, but the modern reader trips over the unfamiliar phrasing and misses the punchline. One of the great virtues of a thoughtful modern adaptation is that it restores the comic timing, allowing the reader to laugh where the author intended laughter, to feel the delight that the original audience felt. In adapting a comic writer like Smith, this is no small consideration. The humor is the heart of the work, and preserving that humor across the gulf of decades is the adaptation’s most important task.

None of this is to suggest that the original work has been altered beyond recognition or that its essential nature has been compromised. The story you will read is fundamentally Smith’s story, told in Smith’s way, animated by Smith’s sensibility. The adaptation is a light touch, a polishing rather than a remaking. Think of it as the careful cleaning of an old painting—the removal of the grime and varnish that have accumulated over the years, revealing the bright colors and crisp lines that the artist originally intended. The painting is unchanged; it is merely seen more clearly. So it is with this edition. Smith’s voice rings through it as clearly as ever, perhaps more clearly than it has rung in many years.

For readers who have never encountered Smith before, this edition offers an ideal introduction—an accessible entry point into the work of a writer who deserves to be far better known than she is. For readers who remember her from the magazines of long ago, or who have sought out her work in the years since, this edition offers the pleasure of rediscovery, the chance to revisit a beloved voice in a form that feels fresh and immediate. In either case, the experience promises to be a rewarding one, and the modern adaptation is offered in the hope that it will multiply the pleasures of the original rather than diminish them.

What, then, can you expect as you turn from this introduction to the story itself? You can expect, first and foremost, to be entertained. This is a book that wears its learning lightly and its purpose lightly, a book that wants above all to give pleasure. The pacing is brisk, the developments are surprising, and the comic energy never flags. There is a momentum to the narrative that carries the reader along almost effortlessly, from one delightful complication to the next, with the satisfying sense that the story is always one step ahead, always ready with a fresh twist or an unexpected revelation. This is storytelling in the classic mode—storytelling that respects the reader’s intelligence while never forgetting that its first duty is to delight.