Con-Fen — Story, Setting & Ideas

Diction and the Alien Perspective

Adams gives his Martians a formal, slightly stilted register. Koosh and Thuko speak in complete, polite sentences: “You are no less pleased than I,” Thuko agrees. They refer to Earth as a “host” city and plan to park their ship on “an unoccupied building.” The narrator adopts a similar tone, describing the landing as “one of utmost perfection” and noting that the Martians are “stumped completely” by the anti-gravity plates. This elevated diction contrasts sharply with the colloquial banter of the human characters later. When the humans argue about what they saw, Bicks says “Something got out of whack” and Paul retorts “It’s too simple.” The shift in vocabulary marks the boundary between alien and human consciousness. Adams does not explain the Martians’ interiority beyond their own words; their formality is their character.

Dialogue as Conflict and Exposition

The excerpted human dialogue is pure argument. Bicks and Paul trade theories about the invisible beings: Bicks favors “invisibility belts” that malfunctioned; Paul proposes an interdimensional origin, saying “they came out of another dimension.” Neither listens to the other. Their exchange is rapid, with short sentences and interruptions: “It’s simple.” / “It’s too simple.” / “Why would both belts conk out at once?” The argument is a vehicle for the reader to see two plausible sci-fi explanations, but the characters themselves are more invested in winning than in truth. Adams uses this to mirror the convention setting—a place where fans debate genre tropes. The Martians, by contrast, never argue; they compliment each other and agree. The dialogue structure thus reinforces the theme of miscommunication: the humans talk past each other, while the aliens, invisible and unheard, are perfectly cooperative.

Description and the Mundane Setting

Adams grounds the fantastic in the specific. The Martians land in Chicago, and the city is named without fanfare: “A Terran would have recognized it as Chicago.” The hotel where the convention is held is described only by its banner: “WELCOME TO THE CHICON II! 10th WORLD SCIENCE-FICTION CONVENTION.” This is the only piece of setting detail given for the human location. The aliens’ ship is a “gleaming silver sphere” but its interior is reduced to a control panel with buttons. Description is functional: the Martians’ one leg, eye-stalks, and hopping gait are noted once and then assumed. The narrative does not linger on sights or sounds. Instead, it focuses on actions—pressing buttons, hopping, arguing, walking up steps. This spare style keeps the pace brisk and directs attention to the central irony: the aliens are invisible, so the humans never see the very beings they are debating.

Recurring Details and Structural Irony

Two details recur: the Martians’ single leg and their invisibility. The leg is mentioned in the opening and again when they hop; it is a physical marker of difference that the humans never perceive. Invisibility is the story’s engine—it allows the Martians to observe without being observed, and it generates the humans’ confusion. The humans’ theories (belts, dimensions) are attempts to explain what they briefly saw, but the reader knows the truth: the Martians are simply invisible. Adams never reveals whether the invisibility is technological or innate; he treats it as a given. The structural irony is that the humans’ elaborate explanations are unnecessary. The story’s final image—the banner for Chicon II—underscores this: the convention is a gathering of people who love speculative explanations, yet they cannot correctly interpret the real aliens in their midst.

Adams’s story rewards attention to its lean prose and the gaps between what characters know and what the reader infers. The Martians’ formal speech, the humans’ quarrelsome dialogue, and the minimal description all serve a single comic premise: the experts are wrong. Readers may enjoy tracking how each line of dialogue or narration either advances the irony or deepens the alien point of view. The story is short enough to reread for craft, especially the way Adams withholds information to let the setting—a sci-fi convention—do the thematic work.