Lyn Venable 16 min read

Left behind as the rockets roar and rise and dwindle into silence, Tyndall throws himself face-down on the strange, cold couch, abandoned, not taken, when they went.

Lyn Venable's 1956 story opens on the desolation of being left behind, building a poignant social-SF tale. Atmospheric, affecting golden-age SF. Read it for a story steeped in the anguish of abandonment, and the strange grove that gives it its name.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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