Robert Scott 5 min read

New York was always safe for astronauts, until the day the hero's welcome curdled into hostility.

Robert Scott's 1962 story follows a uniformed spaceman back from Mars who realizes, in the space of an afternoon, that the crowds who once admired his kind have turned. The security checks are colder, the stares hostile, and a wrong step into a bar becomes a mistake. A tense, mood-driven piece about the fickleness of public adoration and the loneliness of the returning explorer. Read it for a sharp inversion of the space-hero fantasy, when the frontier's champions come home unwelcome.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

5 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).