Richard Rein Smith 17 min read

A man on Mars fingers the fare in his pocket and stares at the ships that could carry him home to a wife and child on Earth.

Richard Rein Smith's 1955 story pauses Chester Farrell at a barbed-wire fence between the alien Martian city and the gleaming spaceships, aching for the brick house in Cleveland he left behind. A quiet, homesick piece of colonial SF about longing and the cost of leaving. Read it for tender golden-age SF that finds real feeling in one man's yearning to go home.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Herman B. Vestal