Katherine MacLean 49 min read

Minos is a lovely planet with nothing obviously wrong with it, except the food, perhaps, and a disease that isn't really a disease.

Katherine MacLean's 1950 story sends the Explorer's hunt party through a beautiful autumn-colored alien forest toward a subtle, insidious first-contact menace. Clever, scientifically thoughtful SF from a writer prized for her biological ideas. Read it for a smart, unsettling golden-age tale where paradise hides a very strange contagion.

In its time

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

Reading it

49 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).