The Star Ducks

About the Author-Bill Brown was born in 1910 in Oregon, USA. He worked
as a journalist, park ranger and teacher of creative writing. As a young man
in 1930s, he made a voyage in a thirty-two feet schooner (a sailing ship) to
the South Seas and during World War II, he descended(moved along) a
Himalayan river by rubber boat. Two of his books, Uncharted Voyage and
Roaring River are based on these adventures. The short story, The Star
Ducks, published in 1950 in the magazine, Fantasy and Science Fiction
marks him as a brilliant science fiction storyteller. Some of his other popular
Sci-Fi works are The Trunk and the Trumpet (1953), Medicine Dancer (1953)
and Spunk Water (1954). Bill Brown died in 1961

Theme of the story -‘Star Ducks’ is about the simplicity of village folks.

Science fiction is generally defined as a genre of speculative fiction typically

dealing with imaginary concepts such as advanced science and technology,
space flight, time travel and extra-terrestrial life.

Summary

‘The Star Ducks’ tells the story of a city reporter who was called in to report a
‘strange plane crash’ in a village. He finds out that it is in fact, an alien landing
and that the aliens had contacted the Alsop couple in the village.

He was told by the Alsops, that the aliens had visited earlier and they had
exchanged space eggs for chicken eggs. Now they had come back for more as
the chicken eggs given earlier did not hatch. When the reporter asks what had
become of the space eggs, he was told that they hatched into Star Ducks!

The story is set in a strange contrast where on one side we are shown
utterly simple, naive and ignorant villagers who have entered into trade
with extraterrestrials even without knowing anything about them. These ETs
have visited them twice within a period of 6 years for the same purpose but
the Alsops are least conscious about the importance of the whole affair. On
the other hand, there is Rafferty, a confident, sensible and logical reporter
who understands the gravity of the whole matter but is left with no proof to
share or to authenticate what could have been the biggest story in the
world and that too has actually happened to him.
The story wraps up with Rafferty leaving the Alsops farm with a heavy heart,
all dazed and hazy in mind.