Marcia Kamien 12 min read

On the last day of school, a professor looks proudly at his class of twenty-year-olds, his Martians.

Marcia Kamien's 1954 story (a striking unsolicited debut) opens in a classroom that is not quite an ordinary one, where the graduates preparing to inherit a new world have earned a new name. Thoughtful, quietly powerful social SF about colonization, adaptation, and what it means to become something new. Read it for a memorable golden-age story about the first true generation of another world.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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