Helpfully Yours
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- General readers looking for a light, short science fiction read
- Readers interested in twentieth-century American popular SF and its comic tradition
- Teachers and students who need a short text for English reading or classroom discussion
- Readers who like first-contact stories but prefer an everyday setting
Not a good fit for
- Readers expecting hard-SF technical worldbuilding or grand space opera
- Readers who prefer serious literary depth and complex structure
- Readers who dislike light comic tone and ironic narration
Reading tips
- Read it in one sitting to catch the twist and where the irony lands
- Reread the title and key dialogue afterward to appreciate the double meaning of "help"
- Note where alien premises clash with human routine, as material for discussion
- Compare with the author's other short stories to see her habitual comic-SF devices
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
Is this a novel or a short story, and how long does it take to read?
Is the science fiction premise complicated?
Does the title "Helpfully Yours" have any special meaning?
Comments
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About the author
Evelyn E. Smith (1922–2000) was an American writer of science fiction and mystery fiction, born in New York, who also worked as a crossword puzzle constructor. In the 1950s she published numerous short science fiction stories in magazines such as Galaxy Science Fiction and Fantastic Universe. Her representative works include "The Blue Tower," "The Venus Trap" and "The Doorway," along with "The Most Sentimental Man," "Collector's Item," "The Princess and the Physicist" and "The Man Outside"; seventeen of her works are held in this collection. Her short stories often treat alien contact, gender relations and consumer society with wit and humour, showing neat plotting and a satirical edge. Under the pen name Delphine C. Lyons she also wrote Gothic romances and the "Miss Melville" mystery series. Public information about her life is limited, and discussion of her work focuses mainly on these magazine stories and her genre fiction.
