This is The Author's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Author's Voice, we'll hear Robert Kuver read his story,

Invasion of the Martians, from the September 12th, 2016 issue of the magazine.

Coover is the author of ten novels, including The Origin of the Brunists, The Adventures

of Lucky Pierre, and the Brunest Day of Wrath. A new novel, Huck Out West, will be published next year.

Now here's Robert Cooper.

In Now here's Robert Cooper. Invasion of the Martians.

The handsome senator from Texas, the capital's leading heartthrob, a former astronaut and a likely future president,

was in bed with two ladies, a young intern

and the more mature secretary of the interior.

The senator called her the secretary of the posterior and had just made several charming

off-color but complimentary remarks about hers, bringing an embarrassed flush to all four of her cheeks and giggles from the intern who was playing with two of them,

when his private security phone chimed with the news, the Martians have landed in Texas. He kissed the ladies, donned his space suit and helmet, and sprang into action.

The senator flew his private jet directly from his ranch to the Martians' landing site,

not at all surprised that they had chosen the great state of Texas for this historic occasion.

There, in an internationally televised address, he welcomed them to the once sovereign

republic of Texas, the last best place on earth, and the heartland of the American nation

to which it also presently owed allegiance. The Martians poured out of their

pear-shaped spaceship like spilled soup. They were pea-green as anticipated, but with fluid

bodies and multiple limbs that appeared and disappeared in the sticky flow. A random scattering of startled eyes blinked like tree lights.

It wasn't easy to see what separated one Martian from another. Texans, the senator declared,

...