The Day After the Day the Martians Came

"The Day After the Day the Martians Came" is a 1967 short story by American writer Frederik Pohl, first published in Harlan Ellison's anthology Dangerous Visions.

Plot
The action takes place entirely within the lobby of a Florida hotel, one day after a NASA spacecraft carrying several live Martians returns to Earth. Their assignments completed, a large group of journalists are loitering in the hotel's bar waiting to check out. Jaded and blasé, the reporters pass the time by playing poker and telling Martian jokes (ordinary ethnic jokes with Martians swapped in for their normal targets, such as Poles.) Except for the windfall profits the hotel has made, Mr. Mandala, the hotel's small-minded manager, views the discovery of the Martians with indifference. After the last of the reporters has left, he remarks to one of his black bellhops - whom he is accustomed to treat with condescension - that the Martians mean nothing, to which the bellhops gnomically replies that they mean a great deal to him.

Adaptations and Sequels
The story was adapted (under the same title) by Marvel Comics in Worlds Unknown #1, May, 1973, illustrated by Ralph Reese.

A follow-up, "Sad Solarian Screenwriter Sam," was published in the June 1972 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It followed a day in the life of an ambitious Hollywood screenwriter, suddenly inspired to capitalize on the media hype surrounding the arrival of the Martians by pitching a film adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom novels. The pitch fails due to screenwriter not having taken a sufficient interest in the nature of the actual Martians (who are not very telegenic.)

After a nearly fifteen-year interval, Pohl revisited the setting in the mid-80s. Five new short stories set in the same milieu were published in Asimov's, MF&SF, and Omni between 1986 and 1987:

• "A Martian Christmas" (originally published as "Adeste Fideles" in Omni, December 1987)

• "The View from Mars Hill" (Asimov's, May 1987)

• "Saucery" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1986)

• "Too Much Loosestrife" (Amazing Stories, October 1987)

• "Iriadeska's Martians" (Asimov's, November 1986)

In 1988, the seven existing stories, three previously-unpublished ones ("The Missioner," "The Beltway Bandit," and "Across the River"), and nine interstitial vignettes written in a quasi-journalistic style were combined into a fix-up novel, The Day the Martians Came.