All were monsters by Manly Wade Wellman
All were monsters by Manly Wade Wellman is a science fiction short story written in the mid-20th century. It centers on a first-contact encounter in which an alien scout evaluates Earth for colonization, only to be shaken by the planet’s abundant nonhuman life and to raise the specter of humanity’s impending self-destruction. A solitary amateur astronomer witnesses a small craft land on his farm and meets a telepathic visitor, Provvorr, who appears
in a human-pleasing disguise and demonstrates advanced abilities like transmuting metal and briefly reviving a dead moth. Provvorr explains his people plan to settle Earth after humans destroy themselves, but he knows nothing of animals; when he meets the narrator’s dog Skip and cat Oscar and learns about the world’s teeming creatures—from mice to snakes—he is horrified by beings whose minds he cannot read and from whom he cannot hide. Concluding that a planet swarming with “monsters” is unlivable for his kind, he abandons the colonization idea. Before departing, he shares a simple way to end human wars and prevent collapse; the narrator vows to pass it on to world leaders, though the story withholds the method itself. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Read or download for free
For an overview of the different reading options, see our Reading Guide
| Reading Options | Url | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read now! | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77940.html.images | 41 kB | |||
| EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77940.epub3.images | 287 kB | |||
| EPUB (older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77940.epub.images | 286 kB | |||
| Kindle | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77940.kf8.images | 1.1 MB | |||
| older Kindles | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77940.kindle.images | 1.1 MB | |||
| Plain Text UTF-8 | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77940.txt.utf-8 | 34 kB | |||
| Download HTML (zip) | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/77940/pg77940-h.zip | 262 kB | |||
| There may be more files related to this item. | |||||
Similar Books
About this eBook
| Author | Wellman, Manly Wade, 1903-1986 |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Hunter, Mel, 1927-2004 |
| Title | All were monsters |
| Original Publication | New York: King-Size Publications, Inc., 1955. |
| Series Title | Produced from Fantastic Universe, May 1955 (Vol. 3, No. 4.) |
| Credits | Tom Trussel (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature |
| Subject | Science fiction |
| Subject | Short stories |
| Subject | Human-alien encounters -- Fiction |
| Subject | Earth (Planet) -- Fiction |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 77940 |
| Release Date | Feb 15, 2026 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 231 downloads in the last 30 days. |
| Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free! | |