Wallace West 13 min read

A lean wind wails through 'storied Dawningsburgh', the restored, repopulated Cradle of Martian Civilization, a $5,000 tourist trap on the scarlet desert.

Wallace West's 1962 story frames its first-contact tale with a garish tourist-brochure vision of a commercialized Mars, sand scouring the neon signs by night. Sharp, satirical colonial SF. Read it for a wry golden-age story about the packaging of an ancient world for the vacation trade.

In its time

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

Reading it

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